Long Beards, Eating Manuals and a Real Font of Knowledge: The Logic Behind Curry’s Quirky Ads
The new brand platform for a UK electronics retailer 'Beyond Techspectations' is taking humour to surprising places with its latest set of brand films.
Created by AMV BBDO, the campaign demonstrates how Currys consistently goes the extra mile to deliver the best expertise and tech knowledge through its colleagues and the extensive training they receive.
Going all-in on humour, the series of ads, directed by Greg Ball and produced by Red Studios, show the retailer’s unrivalled tech expertise and its colleagues’ commitment to going above and beyond via a bizarre collection of scenarios, whether that means eating instruction manuals to gain extra knowledge, cultivating long beards as a symbol of their wisdom, or baptising themselves in a real font of knowledge.
Amused by the weirdness, LBB’s Alex Reeves caught up with AMV BBDO creative directors Jeremy Tribe and David Westland and senior strategist Mike Alhadeff to discuss the campaign.
LBB> Where was the brand when work on this began? How did you define the challenge in the first place and how did that inform the strategy?
Mike> Currys has been the mainstay of the British high street for years, and like a lot of mainstays, we were continuing to do well. But in truth no one really knew what we stood for. We inherently knew this situation could not hold forever with online retailers providing a constant threat to our position on the high street. If we were going to remain a mainstay, we needed to provide a clear reason to go and this helped unlock our strategy.
The fear of the ‘unassisted purchase’. The online world had left people bewildered, clouded by a mass of fake reviews, lots of purchases people made online were not the thing they wanted. It felt like we needed to combat this and we had the perfect solution. Unlike our rivals, we had bricks and mortar stores, and most crucially, real people i.e. colleagues who could offer expert advice.
Selling expertise therefore felt like the perfect strategy in the new world of retail.
LBB> The value of physical shops versus buying online is obviously central. How did those thoughts lead to the knowledge-eating, long beards and drinking from a mystical font?
Jeremy & David> With physical shops you get human, one-to-one expertise and advice that’s irreplaceable. Chatbots just can’t compare. And Currys colleagues get loads of training that they are rightly proud of. So the team just kept riffing and joking around the idea of being trained experts. We wanted to come at it with humour, partly to mitigate coming across as smug, but mostly because it’s fun and cuts through all the boring retail ads out there.
LBB> And how did those ideas end up becoming final scripts?
Jeremy & David> We were just really tickled by the concepts of eating instruction manuals to gain knowledge, or growing beards of wisdom as a by-product of expertise, or installing a font of knowledge to maintain one’s expertise. There were lots of other scripts on the table, but these felt amongst the most effortless. Yes, they are funny ideas, but there is an easy thread of logic that underpins them.
LBB> What were the big craft decisions, both ahead of and during the shoot?
Jeremy & David> For a long time we had been using real Currys staff as the stars of their ads. They are, after all, Currys’ greatest asset. But to pull off these scripts we needed proper comedy acting chops, so the casting process was critical. Our fantastic director, Greg Bell, really sweated this process, finding actors that could play with these odd ideas and present them as though they were the most normal scenarios in the world.
LBB> What will you always remember about working on this campaign?
Jeremy & David> For us, it would be the joy of seeing those first cuts and knowing that the jokes land and are genuinely funny. Hats off to the creative team and client for trusting each other on the journey.
