Project Reface
OVERVIEW
Sonnet is a Canadian Insurance Company dedicated to protecting their customers’ optimism. They wants customers to know that they don’t need to worry about what the future holds, because their insurance protects them from everyday accidents and disasters. To get this message across we created Project Reface, a graffiti project that brings art into urban and depressed areas, but with a twist.
ROLE
Copywriter
CLIENT
Sonnet Insurance
WEBSITE
Young Ones Creative Rankings
CAPABILITIES
Strategy
Copywriting
Advertising
PARTNERS
Theo Gagen, Andrew Garfield,
Thinh Dinh, and Megan Weber
AWARDS
Project Reface won two Gold Pencil awards in the Outdoor and Experiential campaign categories at The ONE Show Young Ones 2018 competition. The Young Ones competition is one of the most acclaimed advertising, interactive and design student competitions. It also won Best Integrated Campaign at The 2018 Dairy Show, University of Colorado Boulder's Advertising and Design Award Show.
ONE SHOW YOUNG ONES 2018 | Gold Experiential & Outdoor
THE CU DAIRY SHOW 2018 | Best Integrated Campaign
CLIENT BRIEF
Sonnet is the modern, fully online and easy way to buy home and auto insurance in Canada. No one likes dealing with their insurance company, but they are willing to change companies during big life milestones. Sonnet wants to target millennials in metro areas during these moments of change to protect their car or house – but also something just as valuable: their optimism. The objective is to create innovative ideas that show how Sonnet protects people’s optimism around big life moments and their areas of business. The key message is that the most valuable asset you have is your optimism, and Sonnet will help protect it.
THE PROCESS
INITIAL IDEA
The negativity in our world is constantly being forced upon us. Whether it’s out of habit, or intentionally, we pay attention to the discouraging aspects of life. With this in mind, my team and I were thinking of doing something with bad news on social media. We thought maybe it’d be cool if Sonnet tweeted back to negative things, or maybe we could blur out negative words or posts for a day on social media, then later reveal that it was Sonnet who did it and why. Our professor, acting as Creative Director, gave us some feedback on this idea. He said we’d need an incentive for Facebook and other social media sites to partner with us. In addition to that, we’d need to put an optimistic spin on it so it didn’t seem like censorship. He suggested we come up with three or four examples of how this could work, so we went back to the drawing board and came up with a whole new idea.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
We concepted further and came up with an entirely different approach. This new idea involved partnering with local artists to make invisible art that could only be seen through Sonnet Optimism Glasses. I quickly realized that if the art was fully invisible no one would know where to look or where the art actually was. We decided it’d be best to make half of the mural in normal paint, visible by anyone, and the rest in invisible paint that would require the Optimism Glasses. Below are some of our mockups resembling how we could achieve this effect.
The next hurdle became how do we make this cross multiple platforms and what instances can we use as examples? We thought of several ways we could carry this concept throughout multiple platforms, but the ones that were most memorable were making and using a Snapchat filter as a way to reveal the invisible parts of the murals, using SnapMap to show where other art installations are nearby, and using Instagram for sharing opportunities. We thought street art that would be activated by rain could be a great addition to our existing idea of half visible art. The idea for this came from searching for inspiration online. We came across the picture below and fell in love with the concept. We loved the idea so much, in fact, that we ended up getting rid of the half painted mural idea and replacing it. Along with focusing on strictly water-activated art, we got rid of the Optimism Glasses and focused on water and Snapchat as the main sources for revealing the art.
TAKEAWAYS
We understand that staying positive can be a challenge, so we wanted to help people see how beautiful the world around them can be. Project Reface aims to make rainy days the best kind of days. With water activated art, gloomy days can become bright again. Throughout this whole process, our concept was always clear: There for you, even when you can’t see it. Just like your insurance.