Busuu - Learn Languages Together

The first brief given by Busuu to Motel was perfectly timed to tap into people’s New Year resolutions… Why not learn a new language? 

Busuu is one of the world’s leading language-learning apps, with a global community of over 120 million learners. 

They wanted to promote their unique community feature in the campaign. The feature enables learners to connect with local speakers around the world, helping them practice their pronunciation, spelling and grammar before using them in public. 

The TV advert opens with a German-speaking man in a taxi, sporting a ridiculous, hand-knitted jumper. He’s using his Busuu app to practise his pronunciation of an English sentence: “Hi Catherine, I love my new clothes”, but he pronounces some of the words wrong, as when learning English, ‘th’ is one of the sounds German people find most difficult to say. 

Throughout the film, different English-speaking members of the Busuu community speak up to help him pronounce “Catherine” and “clothes”. This has amusing consequences as the English-speakers stop whatever they are doing to help improve our German-speaking star’s pronunciation.

In the final scene, we see the hero try out his English sentence on his mother-in-law, in a clearer and better pronounced manner. This is all thanks to the Busuu community. The mother-in-law is delighted by his prowess and hands him another particularly awful sweater. He does his very best to look grateful. 

Claas Ortmann, the Director says: “The most fun for me as a director was visualising and totally getting under the skin of the unique Busuu community. This led us to show the interesting characters in the film in comical situations - the kind that we could all find ourselves in when learning a language. It really highlighted the human aspect at the heart of this cool app.”” 

He continues: “Creating a film for the European market that is completely in English, needed to be uniquely understandable for a non-English speaker. This was my biggest challenge - so I tested it on my parents and they gave me the thumbs up.” 

Lee Tan, Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder of Motel, adds: “The Busuu app’s community means you can get feedback from locals before trying out a phrase in the real world. All language learners know that can be pretty terrifying. We had the pleasure of bringing that to life - with the help of a ridiculous jumper.”