See The Love
Issue 17 | December 2010
Agency
Ogilvy & Mather (Taiwan)
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Jennifer Hu; Art Director: Leah Chen, Kenny Chian; Copywriter: HJennifer Hu, Matt Chen; Agency Producer: Abby Ku, Chuang Chiu Chi; Unison Art Association Executive Director: Chu Yu Min; Unison Art Association Illustrator: Hong, Yu-Cheng; Unison Art Association Art Director: Chu Chien Chen; Director: Masami Karniyama
Other Credits
Account Team: Chairman: Joseph Pai; Vice President: Fy Lu; Business Director: Jessie Wang; Account Manager: May Wu
Date
Oct-Nov 2009
Background
Franz is a brand of delicate china and is usually only found in the homes of the wealthy.
They needed to become more approachable and turn their handmade plates from gifts people gave to be showily extravagant to gifts people gave out of heartfelt emotion and love.
Idea
'See The Love' was both an experience and an exhibition around which a brand campaign emerged.
Invited to ‘make invisible love visible’, advertising invited pairs of people (family, married couples, lovers, friends) to take part in an experiment in which their brainwaves and heartbeats were recorded as they looked at each other. Representing all their emotions, memories and feelings for each other, the data was then turned into a unique pattern on a Franz white china plate.
So, participants were able to create a plate together and were able to actually see their love without words or language.
Two weeks after the experiment, participants received their plates.
Results
Online registration reached its quota within 3 days. Over 90,000 viewers visited the website within 1 week, three times the average. On-site registration at the exhibition exceeded capacity every day. Many news channels showed up to report their story. They even received requests to extend the exhibition. But nothing could compare to the touching moments that occurred everyday during the action, such as the moment a family was brought back together. Torn apart by their son's depression, the family rediscovered their love at the exhibition and embraced each other in tears. This was truly the best result.
Our Thoughts
This campaign would probably be winning more awards at big international shows if the awards submission had been a bit better written. It is such a pain for agencies outside the English-speaking world to be unable to submit work in their own languages. What the entry didn’t explain was the role of the online film that attracted attention to the ‘See the Love’ exhibition. A micro-documentary about a girl and her deaf father, we found it genuinely moving. It was certainly powerful enough to create interest in the show and get many thousands of people to try to register to become participants in the ‘love-in’.
Transforming perceptions of the brand from an icon of extravagance to a symbol of devotion will take time but it’s a brave strategy and, in its first essay, impressively executed.