City Lodge Hotels Helps You Check Out of Everyday Stress

TBWA/Hunt Lascaris and City Lodge are up to their old tricks again. The agency and its long-term client continue to disrupt and redefine how we think about advertising for the hospitality sector. 

The latest contribution? A playful series of subversive films that defy the status quo, speaking volumes – without saying a word. 

Sandy white beaches, lurid sunsets, and cocktail umbrellas afloat in coconuts: think of advertising for the hospitality industry, and these are the clichés that come most readily to mind.  

It’s a sector that leans heavily on the conventional lure of escapist fantasies. Hotels aren’t actually selling us room and board; they’re peddling daydreams that are meant to draw us in because they’re so removed from everyday life. 

City Lodge has deviated radically from this model, in a new campaign that speaks directly to the banal, workaday frustrations that wear us down. The hotel group’s new positioning – 'life is hard. check into easy' – is brilliantly subversive, in that this hotel group doesn’t pretend to be apart from the world; it insists on being a part of it, and attuned to real people’s real problems. 

This daring is all the more pronounced, because City Lodge is situating itself in specific terms – not just in 'real life', but in the fraught reality of post-pandemic South Africa, where the majority is struggling. The abstract, universal aphorism –  life is hard – has a different resonance, in country deeply mired in problems from the top down, and the ground up. 

The continuation of a relationship almost three decades old, the campaign is the work of TBWA/Hunt Lacaris, and characteristic of the irreverent, contrarian sense of humour the agency shares with its client of 28 years. Serious subject matter notwithstanding, both refuse to take themselves too seriously, which has worked to single out City Lodge as a clever, comedic brand, in a comparatively bland sector.  

Their latest collaboration is an update, an acknowledgment of how City Lodge’s identity has evolved. The essence of the brand used to be 'budget-friendly', first and foremost. But the hotel group’s offering has burgeoned into so much more, amid rising rates of business and leisure travel, local and international. 

Concurrently, though, the campaign is an honest, direct response to the socio-economic condition of South Africa: “Sometimes we just want to check out of the stress of everyday life, and check into an experience and mindset of ease – that’s where our hotels come in.” - Zuki Jantjies, divisional director, sales and marketing, City Lodge Hotels. 

Among content that’s stellar across the board for its intelligence, perhaps the purest expression of this refreshed messaging is a series of films, short stories that speak volumes - without ever resorting to audible dialogue. 

Directed by Karien Cherry, the films do something utterly outlandish in the conservative context of the hospitality sector, using titles overlaid on uber-dramatic footage, in lieu of any spoken narration. Each film depicts characters in the throes of tragic despair – but not for the reasons you’d expect. The resultant sense of bathos is hysterically, memorably funny.

“I loved how unashamedly left-field the concept was, and really wanted the performances to match that energy … so I opted not to reveal the final dialogue to the actors”, Cherry says, “instead creating dummy scripts with different backstories as a way to shake up their performances”. 

The disjunct between the gravity of the action and the levity of the written captions generates the kind of comedic dynamism that money can’t buy; and in fact, this is typical of TBWA/Hunt Lacaris’s mode of craft for City Lodge –  work that’s good enough to flaunt its economy, and which refuses to cower behind a mammoth budget, in order to make a big impact.  

Executive creative director, Steph van Niekerk (TBWA/HL), “instinctively loved” the idea “because it felt so different”, she says. “Trying something new, one lives in mortal fear that it won’t translate off the page... but we were in the very best hands with Karien Cherry and the Giant team. There was so much joy and love, throughout the making of these. When you’re lucky enough to go on a ride like this, it always shows in the work”.