This Hornbach Spot Is Like Bathing in the Blissful Pain of DIY Desire

HORNBACH is kicking spring off with a communications bang, placing the sensory experiences of DIY at the centre of the new Europe-wide campaign, created by Heimat: touching and experiencing materials with one’s own hands − from bliss and wellbeing to pain. At the end comes the almost existential-sounding proof of one’s own physicality: You’re alive. Do you remember?

“Creating something with one’s own hands is a unique feeling that every DIY’er knows. This is the time of the year when all those projects around the house and garden that need to be done invite people to touch, feel and experience,” says Thomas Schnaitmann, Head of Marketing Germany and International Marketing Communications at HORNBACH. “DIY is a haptic journey that makes people aware of life at the level of their physical senses. You could say that it stands in opposition to modern, highly rationalised everyday life.”

The new advert communicates in a particularly vivid way the range of emotions that occur when doing DIY. The protagonist experiences quite literally at first hand how stimulating creating something through DIY is. He rolls in the grass full of pleasure and joie de vivre, surfs across gravel on his stomach, feels the surface of wood and how tough it can be and wallows in the mud of his future garden pond with relish. The face of the HORNBACH hero at the end of the commercial then requires no further explanation. This is what happiness looks like.

“This is what the spa effect of a comprehensive, HORNBACH-style spring project may feel like, a place beyond the increasing urbanisation and digitisation of our world,” says Guido Heffels, creative director at Heimat responsible for the client HORNBACH.

The film was created by Australian directing talent Tom Noakes, with the help of production company Partizan. The interesting thing is that almost everything was shot “in camera”, i.e. without any major special effects − a feat that is due to the weeks-long set construction.

The related out-of-home implementation also focuses on contact with the material and the elements, whereby the hand is the key to a haptic experience. The presentation is vivid and features a giant format. There are four motifs altogether that evoke forgotten memories of such experiences and emotions.

The digital implementation of the campaign is also about “pure emotions”. The sensing and understanding of materials in accordance with the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) principle, which describes an emotional, static-like tingling on the scalp, is made possible very impressively through the sense of hearing. Thanks to a special recording technique, the website manages to transport materiality through sounds in an astonishingly intense manner. At the same time, more than 20 of these ASMR clips, made in the HORNBACH style, form the heart of the campaign’s social media communication and digital wireless flights.