Living Portraits Interactive Campaign
Mountain Dew / Pepsi-Cola
Issue 29 | December 2013
Agency
BBDO New York, Firstborn
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer David Lubars Executive Creative Directors Tim Bayne Lauren Connolly Art Director Eduardo Peterson Copywriter Chris Cannon
Production Team
Interactive Company Firstborn Executive Creative Director David Snyder Senior Producer Chris Grey Associate Creative Directors Cameron Templeton David Vale Art Director Bruno Perotto Technical Director Eric Decker Developer Jongmin Kim Junior Designer Tom Huveners Production Company Psyop Smuggler Director Pysop
Other Credits
Group Executive Producer Julian Katz Director of Music/Radio Production Rani Vaz Music Producer Loren Parkins
Date
August 2013
Background
In everything they did, Mountain Dew celebrated the spirit of individuality. They wanted to show that they supported those who are not afraid to be themselves.
At the same time, they wished to bring to life the "This is how we dew" message through their core sponsored athletes. The idea needed to be just as unique as the athletes themselves.
Idea
What better way to express the individuality of their sponsored stars than through art? The idea was to create a series of portraits of the athletes.
On the website, the viewer first got to see a close-up of the star. Then the camera began to pull back. As it did so, 30 to 40 continuously-looping GIFs were revealed around each sitter, all synchronised together in perfect harmony.
Viewers were now invited to go deeper and explore the scene. Hidden in the living portraits were elements which were significant to the athletes. These were videos and pieces of information about the star which gave the viewer a deeper understanding of what it was that made the athlete the person they were.
Results
Total traffic to Dew.com increased by 166% within one month with traffic being driven to the Living Portraits site (300,187 Unique Visitors).
242,317 unique visitors to the site (51% of Dew traffic).
Fans explored deeper into the portraits with nearly 88,000 page views on the site. 2,410,865 total views on YouTube.
Our Thoughts
I’m often amazed by how little some brands make of their major sponsorships. Not a mistake Mountain Dew have made, making their relationships with their brand ambassadors work online as well as offline.
They have learned that you simply cannot post up your TV commercial on YouTube and expect fans to come flocking. They won’t.
The P-Rod commercial has had fewer than 20,000 views but the living portrait has had close to a million. People don’t want to watch ads. They want to be involved. Invited to click, pause, scroll, like.
The portraits are innovative, intriguing and would have had skateboarder Paul Rodriguez, snowboarder Danny Davis and Nascar driver Dale Jr fans leaning forwards.