lululemon

Overview

lululemon came to us with a yoga and Pilates brief and asked whether we had a point of view.

Our first question back was how they defined success. The answer was engagement, so we built the campaign backwards from it. Not awareness dressed up as engagement, but work an audience would choose to watch and choose to pass on.

That meant humour grounded in universal truths women would recognise, with the product inside the world rather than pointed at the camera. These were never ads. They were something worth giving an audience.

Challenges & Approach

Brand comedy fails when the brand is the punchline. It fails harder when the consumer is. We wanted to be funny because we recognised ourselves in it, never because someone was the butt of the joke.

The bigger risk was tonal. Social comedy tends to look cheap, and cheap is the opposite of what lululemon has spent a decade building.

So we brought in Kalu Oji to direct. Kalu comes from feature film, and he understands how to make a piece feel like cinema rather than content. That was the point. We wanted an audience dropped into a world, with characters, a location and a context that pull them in before a single joke lands.

We wrote three scenes around one recurring character, Adelle, and the small social agonies of studio life. A yoghurt container detonates through a gym bag in a changing room. A Pilates instructor stays relentlessly cheerful while the class quietly dies. A woman in savasana is corrected, at length, on how to pronounce Nulu.

Each scene plays straight. No wink to camera, no product hero moment. The clothes are simply what everyone is wearing, because that is true.

The Result

Three films, three teasers, six one shots. Twenty four assets across two formats.

Engagement was the brief and the work delivered it. What we did not brief for was the comment sections filling with women asking what the products were.

We also cut assets to retarget anyone who watched the films, so the creative carried a media strategy behind it rather than sitting next to one.

“No additional feedback on the organic hero assets from me personally. These are absolutely awesome. Thank you to the team, this is exceptional work.”
- Social Media Manager, lululemon ANZ