4:2 Co_Lab Lab (Michelle Obama x Jaguar)

For our second one day brief, we looked at collaboration between brands. We looked at an example of a collaboration between Ralph Lauren and Palace.

They are two very different brands but they came together to create a clothing line and made something that worked.

So for our task we got in to small groups again, I was with Emily and Rogena, and we got given a celebrity to research. We got given Michelle Obama. We used our own knowledge and what we found online to say that we believe that Michelle Obama is a powerful activist, a public speaker, a role model and strong. She takes part in many charitable projects and movements. She is, notably, wife to former president of America, Barack Obama and the first African American first lady and has two daughters.

We were then given a list of brands to choose from, we chose Jaguar, and had to find a way to create a collaboration between the two. We made the connection that the brand and Michelle are both powerful and strong but we decided to use the aspect of Michelle being a mum to determine how the Jaguar brand would come in to play. We thought of the insight that Michelle is modern and innovative but also still a mum and while she has to take care of business, she still takes care of her family and home.

We began thinking of ways we could create a new service/app within a Jaguar car instead of a new car which could assist Michelle as a mother. We all thought of an idea each. My idea was that the app knows your petrol levels and will auto adjust your journey to make a stop to top up your tank at a petrol station. It also suggests how much petrol would be appropriate for your journey.

Rogena’s idea was to have the app act as your reminders synced from your phone's app. So if you’re near a supermarket, it will remind you that you need milk. Emily’s idea was that the app listens to speech in the car. For instance, if you’re travelling with kids and they say they want KFC, the app can auto adjust your journey to fit KFC in if it can and the user wants.

We presented these ideas to Derek and Steve and they told us that we aren’t designing an app, we are planning a campaign. So we need to assume that this app can do everything and it’s fantastic but all we need to do is to get people to know that through a single poster, video or post that gets people to want to find out more about the campaign. They liked the point about using Michelle as a mother and asked how we can relate that motherliness to Jaguar as a female animal.

We took this into account and discussed what we would want our outcomes to look like and we played with different ideas. We thought of a new insight that was 'You’re still a mum, we’re still a car'. We thought of having an outline of a Jaguar act as Michelle’s alter ego and made a mood board to help us illustrate our outcomes.

We decided that we would all do the outcomes on our own using the same idea so that we could have different visualisations of it.

As stated before in my blog, drawing isn’t something I’m strong at, so I attempted creating a mockup for the outcome with the alter ego idea but it just came out poorly and so I decided to change the idea to fit my skill set.

I decided instead of having the jaguar as her alter ego, it would be like her child or pet to encourage the idea of her being a mother. I created this poster as a billboard that has Michelle at home reading a book with the Jaguar laying submissively by her side. The point of my poster was that I don’t need to show Michelle giving a speech or doing something to show she’s a strong woman as people are already familiar with her, so her image and status alone tells people she is a powerful woman.

I turned this in to a tweet and used our insight as our tagline to show people that the campaign is focusing on Michelle as a mother and decided on the campaign name 'Still a Mum' which I hashtagged.

I also created a mini 30 second video for the campaign. As I don’t actually have Michelle or a Jaguar car to use, I used videos from YouTube and arranged them to create what the ad would’ve been. It begins with Michelle getting in to the car and cuts to a Jaguar in the backseat. Michelle puts on her seat belt and as she drives off she opens the back window to show the Jaguar enjoying the ride. I chose this sequence as it follows through on my idea of having the jaguar as her child/pet with it sitting in the backseat and as the mother she takes on the role of driving. The video ends with the text Jaguar x Michelle Obama #StillAMum.

You can view my amazing video ad below:

I presented my work to Steve Spacey and he said he liked the idea of my video ad but obviously the execution was all off. However, he doesn't think the whole #StillAMum thing works because Michelle Obama and Jaguar have such strong presences on their own that I don't need to strip it back and instead I should do it similar to a high end fashion campaign.

I realised looking back, I researched a lot on Michelle Obama but not so much on Jaguar, so I took a look at the campaigns they had done before and was surprised to see that they go for the sleek, high end, urban look for their ads because for our #StillAMum campaign we had almost done the opposite.

Dave Klaiber, who designed this specific Jaguar ad shown above, explained, “This campaign is about progressive style; it’s about a visual look, effortless fashion, true performance and slick movement. And, most importantly, it’s about creating something that defies definition and that sits beyond traditional advertising as we know it".

Although his words are specific to his campaign, I decided to use them as inspiration for mine. I also looked at some quotes from Michelle Obama I could use to mirror their values. Being a role model and an activist, Michelle is naturally confident. A quote from hers that stood out to me was "Strong men, men who are truly role models, don't need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful." If you replace the word 'men' from this quote to 'cars', I feel it correlates to when Derek had reminded our group to look at Jaguars as a female animal and I think I could really make something work in terms of empowering women and women drivers, which ultimately align with Michelle Obama and Jaguar's values.

I decided to go with a new tagline: Power is Female. The tagline represents how Michelle Obama is a powerful lady and how the car itself is powerful and could be seen as using a female jaguar as it's mascot. The power from the car comes from the female driver. I also made a new mockup for my new poster ad (shown below). I used an image of Michelle wearing a sleek and fashionable outfit and paired her with a hot Jaguar car to match her look.

I also made a new short video ad to mirror my new idea. I used snippets from an existing Jaguar ad that uses the urban style I wanted and an ad featuring Michelle Obama. Unfortunately, Michelle doesn't actually star in a lot of video ads, so the clip I have of her is quite short so I also used soundbites from a Michelle Obama speech where she speaks about strength and power, which reminded me of an upbeat song called Power by EXO that state the lyrics "We got that Power" repeatedly, so I used it as the background music for the ad. You can view my video ad here:

I feel I've achieved what Klaiber said about "progressive style; it’s about a visual look, effortless fashion, true performance and slick movement" in my own poster and video ad

Lastly I created a new social media mockup for my new outcomes:

What I learnt from this brief was the difference between designing a campaign and designing an ad. A campaign is the selling of the ad to get consumers interested in finding out more of what the product/service is, which the ad will give them more details of. I was also reminded of the importance of research!