love distance

I was due to go to a Contagious briefing with Emma and Emily the other week. It was all about brands being useful, so I was sad not to make it in the end. Anyway. They went and saw this as a case study. Hadn't seen it before, and I just really like it. Love Distance was a piece of comms to promote Sagami condoms in Japan, dramatising the benefit that they are just 0.02mm thick. Unbranded ads appeared on TV, starting to tell the story of a couple in a long-distance relationship. They drove you to a site you could choose to enter as a boy or a girl. There the story continued to unfurl over time, showing how the man and woman were running 1,000km across Japan to be with each other by Christmas. But you still didn't know who it was for. At the end of it all an ad pieced the whole story together, including appropriate visual metaphors and pack shot. It's the transmedia storytelling that I love. I know, I know. It's still just flogging stuff. But I'm hooked on the idea that a brand can entertain you over time - bringing you something that feels more meaningful or substantial, campaign as content, that kind of thing. We organise ourselves around stories, whether it's the novel or magazine in your bag, or the film or soap you watch on TV. So it's always a good thing in my book when a brand wants to create the platform for a story, and not interrupt or arrange itself around them.