Tetley Pre-Visualisation gets them Talking

Tetley Tea relaunched their brand in the UK with a £3 million marketing campaign featuring Dave and Ella, a talking dog and cat chatting away over cups of tea. The “Now we’re Talking” series was designed to transform the brand to give it a more modern appeal and target a wider, more diverse audience. But before embarking on a major shift in messaging, investing in a huge media spend, not to mention a complex CGI production, Tetley’s agency, Spark44, needed to develop and test the new direction for the brand. They commissioned LEAP for our account managed, full-service pre-visualisation.

LEAP’s artist reps organised our talented illustrators to develop the look and feel of the characters as well as set the scene. Our Film and Post team then transformed the artwork into an animatic complete with voice over recordings and sound effects to bring the script to life.

The “Rainy Day” animatic performed well in qualitative research tests, inspiring confidence for the likely success of the campaign. The test commercial was also an effective blueprint for the development of the CGI commercials. The resulting “Now we’re talking” campaign launched across social media and TV channels and went on to rank as the third most-effective TV ad of 2019 in the UK by System1, in partnership with ITV.