Showcasing British Resilience in the Face of a Lockdown

The world has changed; it has slowed down to a grinding halt, not only in our daily routines, but also in the way that we work.

The Virgin Media campaign was everything but slow: five days to produce a commercial, find a song by a noteworthy artist, edit it and license it. Wake the Town stepped up to the challenge to find the perfect song. 

The brief was find a track by a British artist for a British company. Virgin Media needed a song that carried the right balance of emotion both lyrically and musically. Many of us are feeling scared, anxious and off-kilter with this new way of life and we wanted to find a song that perfectly walked the line between uplifting and realistic. It’s no good having a track that tells you everything is going to be OK, because we don’t know what the future holds; all we know is that we must do what we can to get through each day.   

This timeframe meant that we were engaged in the creative process around the clock to find the correct track that would punctuate the emotional depth of the spot and the message it conveys. It was an incredibly intense process for the entire team but it was amazing.

It’s extremely important for us to be able to highlight the pivotal elements within a track that work in different sections of a film and that’s why for us,  a music search means cutting ideas to picture. In this case, the edit behaved like frantic feet exposed to summer sand; it could not stand still, it kept evolving with new footage added and old subtracted. While hugely exciting, this meant we had to adapt our thinking process and a musical structure to an ever changing commercial. 

It is also inspiring to see an agency get it right and Adam&EveDDB did. As always they’re amazing to work with and collaborated throughout the process which undoubtedly made our job a lot easier.

Where did we end up and why? Ben Howard’s ‘Keep Your Head Up’ is the perfect example of how a track can capture what the entire nation needs to hear in these strange times. Put this track together with the fantastic editing of online footage, curated by the agency in the absence of a traditional shoot, and it results in something sincerely moving and movingly hopeful.