WordPress Peace of Mind.
No brief, no creative department. Target audience: everybody. In late 2023, on top of running internal comms for a company of 1,200, I was asked to make an external facing ad campaign give potential customers a reason to choose WP Engine. So in off-hours, I invented an iconic character, wrote every script, and produced seven commercials with two days in-house filming. Digiday finalist for best ad and we made it all for under $8k.
Prologue
WP Engine was in desperate need of a campaign that moved beyond selling straight utility or vaguely inspirational software marketing slop that says nothing. My secret, audience empathy: the people running websites even at an enterprise scale are still everyday people, and nobody likes feeling like the entire weight of a corporation's web presence is on their shoulders with no backup. The campaign said, "If you're tired of going it alone, WP Engine is full of friendly, magical people here to help."
World Building
Plenty of companies are happy to sell you peace of mind. What we could do differently was visualize it: take someone out of the stress and pain of everyday work and transport them somewhere magical, heavenly even, where somebody is just happy to step up and help.
The sage started out as almost a Geek Squad type in a van that pulls up behind you. Where we landed was Carl Sagan in a teal turtleneck at an Apple Store in heaven where magic is real and technology is hidden and wisdom is dispensed exactly how you need it.
Our protagonist was a solo webmaster saddled with a million tasks and odd jobs, a kanban board of post-it notes filling up with everything they owed the website.
The campaign
The pilot spot: a solo webmaster in a hectic brainstorming meeting of endless web-to-do's in the form of post-it note kan-ban chaos, is whisked away to a serene, heavenly location where the WP Engine sage peels the note off, folds it into a paper crane and hands it back. Back home, every note falls off the wall.
Watch on YouTube ↗We needed a spot highlighting our eCommerce offering. Same story, but someone surrounded by inventory and products and things not moving. I bought a pile of dancing cactus toys from China, at the time not trademarked, and set them all off at once.
Watch on YouTube ↗Our meditation video. This one hit me like a bolt of lightning while doing morning errands and I had to drop everything I was doing before I lost it.
Watch on YouTube ↗Had fun exploring the balance of strength and serenity. This was nearly a direct response to getting so many requests to convey so many ideas in one ad. Thought about Tai Chi: using the momentum of your adversary against them, creating strength and stability in a quiet confident way.
Watch on YouTube ↗Seven spots, six hours of footage, two days, in-house, cut into every length and ratio the ad markets needed. For the next year, we came back with a new round of Sage actors and even bolder ambitions. We filmed and produced a number of amazing ads that sadly never got to make it to market due to some shakeups in the WordPress world that made some headlines.