The best sleep hack? A job well done

It was sometime in January this year that my ex-colleague, now COO at SleepyCat, reached out to me with a brief for a campaign. It was one of those 'open briefs' - I know some Creatives hate them, but I love them; I love having just a good problem statement with a few basic guardrails and plenty of room to figure out the solution. 

The problem was simple - SleepyCat’s been around for a while, but they’re not as well-known as they should be. This was proven to me by people confusing it with Sleepy Owl, other ‘Sleepy’ namesake brands, and even a pet care company.

The only issue that made the problem slightly less simple? A modest budget. This automatically ruled out scripts with celebs and scripts with multiple setups - both of which often help add a certain scale & stature to campaigns, especially when the task at hand is awareness. (At least three of SleepyCat’s competition brands have relied on celebs for their recent campaigns, which made this brief that much more challenging.)

But I think it was in one of Dave Trott’s talks that I’d picked up one of my important career lessons - your most important media is not actually the media; it’s the people. It’s what ideas latch on to and where they first go 'viral' - in their minds. So, all we needed was a film that people would notice and talk about - the very first tenet of advertising, but one that we seem to overlook more often than not these days. 

A clear problem statement also gave us very clear direction. Of the seven routes of scripts presented over two rounds of presentations, there were two that stood out - one that spoke about how sleep transforms you as a person, and the other being the one that saw the light of day. Everything else was nice, but perhaps too correct - easier, safer, but also for the same reasons, more likely to fail. 

The first route, however, required collaborating with another brand. Between the SleepyCat team and I, we spent close to 45 days chasing down people from the other brand’s marketing team, sending emails & LinkedIn DMs, requesting introductions from people who know people who know people (thanks, Mayur), hoping against hope that the legal team would find a loophole that would help us bypass brand permissions, wondering if we could buy our way out of it with money we didn’t have… the works. But as luck would have it, every lead led to a dead end. (Newsflash: If you thought you’re too old to be ghosted at 37, you have another thing coming.)

In hindsight, I wish I’d spent less time pursuing script #1. Everyone - client, producers and directors - was more excited about script #2 to begin with, but adamant Creative that I am, I was determined to see idea #1 through. But adamant Creative also panics when she realises the deadline is not that far away, so adamant Creative gave in to adamant Account Manager (also me), and finally moved on to route #2. 

What followed was an intense battle of the production houses, and after many discussions and debates, we felt we’d finally found our partners-in-crime (and comic timing) in Mothership Productions. Next came many weeks of prep, the most challenging part of which was finding a Thai actor who could emote just as well in English. Jokes and characters were added, lines deleted, and to every “How are we going to pull so many scenes off in time?” I received a “We’ll figure it out.”

(Thank god for demanding directors and delusional producers.)

Next came an 18-hour shoot and weeks of sleepless nights polishing the film to near perfection. 

About a month in, we were finally ready. We said our prayers, dropped the film, and sat back. And while we knew the film would be one of those that’d be hard to ignore, we weren’t quite ready for just how much it would get talked about. So much so that people thought we’d pumped in a whole lot of money into influencer marketing, which brought with it its own share of cynicism. (Fact: Almost all the shares and media mentions were entirely organic, with less than 15 paid posts across channels with a very modest budget.)

It’s been a little less than a week since the campaign went live. And while I’m still waiting for the campaign results, this much I can say for certain: to be creative is to lose a lot of sleep over decisions, edits, criticism and self-doubt. But the best antidote to all those sleepless nights? It’s a job well done. 

Rapid Fire With Myself:

• Most Jugadu Part Of The Campaign: Sukriti (the director) training the Thai actor over Zoom calls because we couldn’t fly her down for several days of practice. 
  

• Scenes That Didn’t Make It: A guy getting a slap facial in time for his roka and a gola wala whose business starts to boom after selling 'ice flavoured' golas for some post-treatment relief.
  

• My Fav Moment In The Film: The Thai actor’s extempore depiction of techniques - entirely unscripted and hilarious.
  

• What Other Clients Can Learn From This Client: Trust the Creative.
  

• Most Surprising Aspect Of The Client: Didn’t smile once during the presentation, and then pushed for the most inane script. 

This article is penned by Shikha Gupta, Independent Creative Director.

Disclaimer: The article features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the stance of the publication.