From an “Oh No!” to an ‘I Do!” moment

Unfortunately, there’s no way to put this delicately!

So, OK – on a scale of 1-10, what’s the worst thing that a designer can be asked to create? We’ve all been asked to ‘do me a Business Card’. Then there’s the old ‘logo for a friend’s new Delivery Business’ chestnut. Or, in at number 8 with a bullet, an advert for a small local hotel, owned by a friend of your Mum’s cousin who’d heard that you were good at drawing!

Well, and you need to trust us on this, there’s something worse, much worse, than any of those. How about Wedding Stationery for a highly valued and much loved client? Scary, eh?

The first reaction is always to try to think of an excuse – “it’s a lovely thought, but I’m just so busy and I’m worried that I won’t do the project justice!” Maybe, in such circumstances, a more honest –“you must be joking!” – response would be more useful.

Nothing like that happened, so this story is about how Idealogy turned an “Oh No!’ moment into a powerful personal branding experience for Lisa Rickhuss, Simple’s CRM Manager and her new husband Nigel Taylor, who began their own official partnership at the end of October 2010.

Don’t like yours much

Simple recently asked Idealogy to come up with a campaign to promote the benefits of it’s products in fighting the signs of ageing, so we started thinking and bounced ideas around in one form or another for over 6 months.

From our initial ideas the project went through several iterations; we finally decided upon illustrating how someone with a poor quality lifestyle would age quicker and more harshly than someone with a healthier lifestyle. Simple products would obviously help this improvement too of course and we would promote the New Repair Anti-Wrinkle Range.

Then someone came up with the idea of showing a young, beautiful woman ageing (time-lapse style) from 25 to 75 very badly. We could do a quick rewind and then show the young woman ageing more ‘gracefully’. Some shock-factor tactics that we could use on the Simple website.

So about a month ago we started to put the piece together. The first thing to do was to cast two models who could feasibly be the same person at different ages of their life. Once chosen we arranged for them to attend a photo-shoot on the same day, enabling us to have the exact same lighting and feel for both.




Some additional Photoshop and a couple of pieces of animation software later it was looking pretty scary; a time-lapse video with 2 very different endings.

Initially the video was promoted through the national press (Heat magazine doing a massive article showing celebrities aged badly), health & beauty blogs and traditional PR via press contacts. Secondly, Simple’s quarterly email newsletter had a feature on it which also tied into a competition to win a photo of yourself aged. Then finally a version was seeded via a network of social media sites, blogs, forums and of course YouTube.

The Simple website itself had special landing pages that traffic was driven to and an interactive version of the video that allowed the user to pause the ageing process whilst reading skincare do’s and don’ts

First responses are good, with traffic up 800% on the first day of release and 1700% on the second and holding steady at 1700% on the third.

Take a look and tell us what you think – we’d love some feedback.


Posted by Paul Skinner