The challenge

The brief for ‘Love your Pension’ was to create a piece that would encourage millennials to think about their pensions. It would be promoted via social media, so it had to be disruptive.

The idea from the agency (Third City) was to create a piece that revolved around the line “don’t work like a dog all your life.”

Oh, and it had to contain talking dogs.

A dash of science

We’ve all evolved loving patterns. It’s kept us all alive. If something changes within our immediate environment, then we become alert. The brain apparently can unconsciously process up to 11 million pieces of information per second. However, it can only consciously process about 40 of these, deciding what’s important and discards the rest. If the brain clocks something that is unexpected, then it gets our attention.

What we did

This campaign was disruptive, so it needed to be a pattern breaker. Social media bombards viewers with so much content that the brain doesn’t always bring it to the viewer’s consciousness. Everything created was within a human environment – yet the dogs (an animal with positive associations to the viewer) broke the pattern enabling the campaign to be disruptive.

The script was designed to have short soundbites (to reduce long shots on the dogs) and was a fine balance between making dog references and not overusing puns.

The Breakfast Club at Hackney Wick was dressed to reflect a dog’s world, right down to the poster design and coffee. This is a perfect example of how an incredible location can take a piece of work to the next level.

At the end of the shoot, a number of cutaways (B-Roll) were recorded to cover the piece if we needed to edit shots of the dogs together. However, these were not required.

Every dog was given a back story and props to reflect this and talented voiceover artists to reflect their personalities.

The obvious challenge was working with so many animals in one shot. You have to prepare for everything in a shoot and this one had a higher level of unpredictability. A series of different seating arrangements were set up to get the dogs at the right levels, and the shots with all four dogs were filmed first thing in the morning before the dogs got restless.

The results

A challenging piece which was then taken to another level by JumpKick, who made the dog’s mouths move. Engaging, gentle, and pattern-breaking.

This was part of a larger campaign run by the Third City agency. It enjoyed 1.4 million views across social media due to the video being shared and engaged with.