Starbucks: Your #1 Hype Girl
Assignment: For Visual Storytelling at Brandcenter, we were asked to make a 30s ad for Starbucks (in theory, not as a 'live client').
Observation: People post photos of themselves with coffee as a form of social capital. Posing with coffee says the photo is candid and casual, but the subject is driven and in control. Basically, coffee says cool.
Strategy: We wanted to position Starbucks, via their iconic siren logo, as the "#1 Hype Girl" for anyone projecting their awesomeness out into the world with a coffee in their hand.
Approach: We needed to find a way to wink at "coffee says cool" without saying it outloud (nothing is less cool than talking about coolness*). But mostly we just wanted to project a vibe, so we stitched together found images and videos from across social media of people looking awesome, set against "Intimidated" by Kaytranada (feat. H.E.R.).
Audience: After a survey of recent Starbucks campaigns, our sense was most of it was set to resonate with Millennials and Gen X. We wanted to create an ad that would resonate with digital natives/Gen Z.
*Oh no what have I done?
The Team & My Role
Catherine Emblidge
Anari Fleming
Ed Keithly (me)
#1 Hype Girl
Catherine came up with "Whether or not you #wokeuplikethis" and had a real gift for putting into words how we wanted something to look and feel.
Anari came up with the original concept and art directed.
And I edited using FCPX and chose the song. (Figuring out how to make the images change to the beat of the song was really satisfying, and a lot more math than I'd expected.)
But saying anything was fully someone's doing seems silly, because if we didn't all agree something was a good idea, it didn't make it into the ad.