By Daniel Kee
It has been a year of reimagination, reinvention and recalibration. The global economy is still on the mend and geopolitical tensions make for an uncertain and ambiguous world — conditions that demand humanity to be at its most ingenious and creative.
In 2023, we embraced the mantra of staying Positively Dissatisfied, to keep ourselves going at a problem until it’s resolved meaningfully and famously. The philosophy is most evident in three of our favorite pieces of work this year.
Three pieces of work from MullenLowe Singapore
“As Close as It Gets” cinema and online campaign for PRISM+
This campaign for PRISM+ shows off a level of immersion that gets the viewer as close as it gets. Humour is an extremely finicky beast, and as far as we’re concerned, no one has mastered it like the Thais. That’s why we were psyched about landing Khun Un, FACTORY01’s maverick director, who is famously picky about the projects he works on. When he said, “This is the best concept I’ve seen so far,” we were pumped. We went on to change the concept completely.
A project that began before the pandemic, suffered a two-year delay, and finally emerged completely unrecognizable from its original form, before going on to win awards in every show it has entered so far? It’s hard not to include this campaign in our list of the year’s favorites.
“Audioboobs”, an erotic audio series for Smile Makers
How do you encourage women to perform breast self-examinations? A team of young ladies postulated that it could be naturally woven into audio erotica — leaving listeners’ hands free to perform self-checks — in the midst of self-pleasure. It’s smart because it rides on existing behavior, appeals to a fast-growing audience and breaks some tired taboos. And it reminds the understandably weary among us that only in advertising can you write spicy stories, toy with album cover art and possibly impact the life of a stranger.
“Eat Me If You Dare” global TikTok activation for Unilver’s Knorr
It’s not a complete year without a solid piece of work through the oldest client-agency relationship in the world — MullenLowe and Unilever. This year, in partnership with TikTok and Vice, we brought together a dozen international content creators on World Eat For Good Day, for a unique game of truth or dare that came down to eating insects. This was all in service of sharing truths about the effects of food production and consumption on the planet, and to encourage more sustainable choices.
Conceived in the Singapore office, it was also a best-in-class example of working as a global network — the project involves Team IPG Unilever in the UK and IPG agencies Weber Shandwick and R&CPMK, as well as experience agency Swamp Motel. It is Unilever’s best performing TikTok campaign to date.
Three other pieces of work we wish we did
And here are some inspiring pieces of work done by someone else that got us to say, “Why didn’t we think of that?”
“Where to Settle” by Mastercard
The Russia-Ukraine war has caused the biggest migration crisis in Europe since WWII and as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees pour into Warsaw, overwhelming the city’s services, a humanitarian crisis soon became a housing crisis and a job crisis. Mastercard attempted to get ahead of it by creating a digital tool that presents the cost of living, job opportunities and housing availability in different areas of Poland, to help Ukrainians find the best places to move.
We love how a payments solution company thought to combine their own spending data with data from Statistics Poland and Polish real estate and job portals to help a country and its new arrivals find a sustainable way forward. It’s odd to discuss this as an advertising idea. It’s a service to humanity that brands with the means should be practicing as the natural thing to do.
Send an audio Christmas greeting using WhatsApp, but make the waveform look like a Coca-Cola bottle, and win some prizes. It doesn’t get simpler than this. The challenge itself could have been the prize, and Coca-Cola would probably still have received the 400,000 audio messages they did, in 20 days.
“Free range” is a label that consumers don’t fully understand. How can a brand like Honest Eggs differentiate itself from big egg producers hiding behind misleading labels? Give the chickens fitness trackers that count their steps, and display their steps taken on the eggs they lay. Genius.
Here’s to a 2024 with more inspiring pieces of work that challenge the way we see the world and encourage us to become better versions of ourselves.