Uncommon Crafts '90s Game Inspired DOOH Series for ITV's ‘Drama vs Reality’ Campaign

This week, Uncommon has launched a new digital outdoor suite for ITV to support the broadcasters recently unveiled brand campaign: ‘Drama vs Reality.’ The campaign will run in multiple digital sites across the UK for the next month.

The work aims to highlight the wealth of drama and reality shows that are available on ITV Hub. The idea behind the new campaign shows stars from drama and reality TV stopping at nothing in the fight for our attention.

The campaign first launched with a series of long-form films shot by Oscar-winning Director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, Les Misérables). The films showed renowned drama stars pitted against beloved reality stars, where each unexpected pairing attempted to take each other out in amusing, underhand ways in their bid to win the battle for viewers’ attention on ITV Hub. Click to watch the films here: Poison and G&T.

The new DOOH campaign, planned and delivered by Essence Media, reflects these on-screen battles with animated retro design in the style of classic 1990’s ‘beat ’em up’ games. The playful digital suite shows our drama and reality stars as their own profile-like characters battling it out in familiar environments such as the Love Island villa and a coastal crime scene from an ITV drama.

The digital scenes include fights against BAFTA-winning actor Jason Watkins vs Love Island winner Kem Cetinay and actress Katherine Kelly up against reality queen Ferne McCann. Each player has a special winning move to beat their opponent including a shadow pass, electrocution and power punch.

The motion graphics were created in collaboration with renowned illustrators Rave Growl, based in South Africa. Their intricate design experience aided to the craft and execution of the individual character icons and game-like moves.

The ‘Drama vs Reality’ campaign is set to continue with more filmic battles airing later in the year as well as over the coming weeks innovative activations on younger skewing platforms such as Snapchat and Tiktok, bringing the ‘Drama vs Reality’ idea to life, for what is ITV’s biggest brand campaign of recent times.