The challenge
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 a cuppa. But before launching the hugely successful commercials, Tetley’s agency, Spark44, invited leap to develop and test the new direction, with an account-managed, full service pre-visualisation.
Our approach
Designed to transform the brand to give it a more modern appeal and target a wider, more diverse audience, the “Now We’re Talking” campaign with Dave and Ella marked a significant shift for the brand. Tetley wanted to dip their campaign biscuit before fully dunking into a huge media spend and complex CGI production.
We called on our talented illustrators to develop the look and feel of the proposed characters as well as set the scene for the commercial series. Our Film and Post teams then transformed this artwork into an animatic complete with voice over recordings and sound effects to bring the script to life.
The outcome
The “Rainy Day” animatic we produced had a great impact 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 now familiar Tetley campaign launched across social media and TV channels and went on to rank as the third most-effective UK TV ad of 2019.
Expertise required
- imaging and animation
