Making a Fleet Card Promotion Visually-Striking with TONIC DNA
It’s not always easy trying to sell a financial card. The product isn’t inherently glamorous; the benefits you promote all stem from spending money, and it’s likely that a good number of your viewers will already have one by the time they see your ad. In short, trying to justify why people should make the jump is usually an uphill battle at the best of times.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. A great example of how this gets done effectively can be seen in TONIC DNA’s latest work to promote the ‘Shell Fleet Navigator’ card for fleet managers. With creative driven by Edelman and directors collective Airplan, it was up to the animation studio to bring stunning environment design and animation to the table, which is exactly what the team did. Responding to the script with engaging style, fun motion concepts and dynamic detailing – from cute pop-up icons to transition animations – it all serves to demonstrate the benefits of the card in a fun, original and standout way.
To learn more about the process, LBB’s Jordan Won Neufeldt sat down with TONIC DNA’s creative director of strategy and communications, Jay Mark Caplan, as well as Airplan director Donat Aron Ertsey for a chat.
LBB> From the top, what was the brief for this campaign, and what immediate ideas came to mind?
Jay> The creative concept and script came from the agency, Edelman. Below is how we understood the brief:
The ‘Shell Fleet Navigator’ card for fleet managers acts as a one-stop solution, allowing managers to focus on the things that really matter. We needed to show all the benefits this one card brings to the table with an animated infographic. This included:
- Clear, easy to ‘read’ style that’s also human and engaging.
- Design and animate each layer of benefits in ways that enhance understanding.
- Build on the design ideas presented by the agency with fun motion ideas.
LBB> Storyboarding a concept like this would be an interesting challenge. Can you tell us what this process was like? How did you start putting things together?
Donat> The creative concept and script came from the agency. Our job was to create a design language and animation language to match that.
We recommended a clean, simple style that lends itself well to pop-up animations. Some other points we tried to ensure were that the scenery would ‘pass’ by the card – taking us to new places as icons appear – and that entirely new scenes or elements would appear with a more dynamic flip. It’s the little details that draw the viewer in and tempt them to rewatch!
All in all, we had fun with the pop-up icons, background actions, and transition animations to build the world of our story.
LBB> Of course, one of the standout aspects of the work is the consistent art style. What inspired this approach?
Donat> We created a fun, highly-pictographic icon series that helped ‘act out’ aspects of the ‘Navigator’ experience. For instance, when the car goes through a roadside diner, doughnuts and coffee captions pop up. We step out of the purely transactional recording of numbers (money, fuel, etc.) into vivid experiential details like smiling, eating a piece of cake, etc.
We rendered these icons in volumetric 3D so that they could do moves like a flip or a 180.
LBB> The character design is another standout element. Can you tell us how this aspect came to life?
Jay> To design our fleet manager character, we watched videos and read articles targeting fleet managers. Then, we created a persona based on that. How do we see our fleet manager? He’s confident, handsome, early-mid 40s, with minimal facial hair. He’s a white-collar guy, but also a doer with hands-on experience in the industry. He’s dressed for the office and going on the road if need be. He had to be a master of a lot of different areas, and constantly learning. His mannerisms exude capability.
LBB> Finally, what lessons have you learned in the making of this campaign?
Jay> Edelman really came through with not only an engaging idea, but a tangible design for us to build on. Instead of spending a lot of time figuring out the complex ‘cardscapes’ from scratch, we could really focus on taking the idea further.
The lesson for us was that production goes a lot smoother when agencies have done some visual development on their end to road test their own ideas. A few rough pencil sketches up front can save many weeks of review down the line!
