The Nightjar
Issue 19 | June 2011
Agency
AMV BBDO
Creative Team
Copywriter: Mark Fairbanks; Art Director: Thiago de Moraes
Production Team
Production Company: Something Else; Post Production: The Lab
Other Credits
Clients: Nikki Kensit - Brand Manager, Sue Cobbledick - Senior Brand Manager, Sas Horscroft - Senior Marketing Manager; Agency Planners: Joe Heath, Charlotte Stone; Digital Producers: Esther Cunliffe, Louise Tanner; Director: Paul Bennun; Production Co Producer: David O’Donnell; Audio Post Production: Nick Ryan; Digital Design Co: The Lab
Date
April 2011
Background
5 Gum plays a vital role in the Wrigley’s portfolio as their lead youth brand. Everything about it has been designed with this audience in mind - from its co-created beginnings, to its stylish packaging to the unique flavours that promise to ‘stimulate your senses’ with every chew.
The challenge was to create a campaign that both lived up to the experience of chewing 5 Gum and helped support its high-end youth positioning in the gum category, ultimately helping to drive sales and establish the brand’s role in young consumer’s lives.
Idea
The solution was The 5 Experience’, an ambitious multi-media project designed to transform 5 Gum into an iconic entertainment platform for the digital age.
Inspired by the stimulating and sensorial experience of chewing 5 Gum, consumers will be offered amazing content and experiences that tap into the classic youth interests of gaming, music, film, art and fashion.
2011 is the year of gaming and The 5 Experience will be launching a series of mobile gaming apps that offer new and exciting ways to experiment and stimulate the target audience’s senses.
The first app, The Nightjar, is a sci-fi inspired, first-player video game with one distinct feature – there’s no video. Instead this is a revolutionary audio game for the iPhone, featuring the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Warhorse), which uses cutting-edge 3-D sound technology to create an immersive experience that pushes the ‘stimulate your senses’ promise to the limits.
Flung into the deepest, darkest reaches of space, players find themselves stuck on The Nightjar, a dying spaceship on a decaying orbit around a black hole. To survive the perilous journey players have to navigate the darkness with only the use of their ears.
The Nightjar is just the start of an epic journey for the 5 Gum brand with more apps coming in the months ahead in a bid to get 5 Gum one of the most talked about, and chewed over, youth brands in 2011.
Results
Nightjar launched on 25th April and it’s too early to determine how successful the campaign has been.
Our Thoughts
So, this is the first of the five senses to be explored – sound. And coming up we’ll have the others, taste, touch, smell and see. It will be fascinating to find out if turning 5 gum into an entertainment brand turns engagements into sales. It seemed to work for Burger King in the USA yet they have recently fired the agency.
What makes this idea intriguing is how counter-intuitive it is. It’s a video game without video and precisely the sort of teasing idea only someone with a background in traditional advertising would have. Pure-play digital creatives, I suspect, like to demonstrate technology whereas old-school creatives like to use it.
It’s why Abbott Mead Vickers is rapidly becoming one of the world’s top digital agencies because what the brand says is more important to them than how it says it.