Dow Coating Materials, Splashes Campaign
Welcome to a new retrospective that celebrates our 20th anniversary by exploring our favourite branding, design or digital projects that significantly impacted our agency and the marketing achievements of our clients.
This week we kick off our retrospective with the campaign that helped us to grow eatsleepthink into the agency it is today. Splashes, for Dow Coating Materials, our first work with G&S Business Communications, heralding a twelve-year partnership that’s still ongoing. We were tasked to pitch for a campaign to build awareness and celebrate the new Dow Coating Materials division following Dow’s acquisition of Rohm and Haas. The brief was to generate a series of adverts promoting the new business’s four values: Collaboration, Growth, Innovation and Inspiration. We did our homework and worked with the team at G&S. We wanted to create a campaign that disrupted a relatively benign, business-to-business industry, provoking a challenge to competitors and positioning Dow as a leading brand.
For an industry that allows paint manufacturers to bring colour into people’s lives, the advertising and communications in 2010 were, at their best informative, at their worst, dull. So we had a perfect canvas to work with, a blank one that desperately needed a colourful new approach. Our idea was simple, to use visual metaphors for each value and digitally illustrate them using splashes of paint. A simple idea that ended up being a very complex execution. We settled on four images, an atom for inspiration, koi carp for collaboration, innovation as a bridge, and a tree with the world as its leaves representing growth. Our team took hundreds of photographs of splashing paint, used stock imagery and took to their graphics tablets to illustrate the final images in Photoshop. Two hundred hours later, the Dow Splashes campaign was born with over four thousand layers in Photoshop, masses of caffeine and a still-existent twitch in the left eye of our Creative Director.
The campaign was a significant success for Dow; it disrupted the industry and positioned them firmly as a market leader. Furthermore, Splashes won eatsleepthink and G&S a European Excellence Award, a valued partnership and more high-value work from Dow. Splashes truly changed our fortunes with rapid growth in clients, revenue and staff. It’s fulfilling when hard work pays off, and one job makes such a difference. In 2012 at the American Coatings Show, we designed Dow’s trade show booth and noticed a plethora of ‘paint splash’ focused imagery and campaigns. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” We’d moved on, but competitors were still catching up; need we say more? We’ll probably return to Dow over the year as we further explore other projects and campaigns.
The Dow Splashes campaign was created before digital communications and data analytics scaled up to where it is today. However, the thinking, execution and strategic positioning behind it are still timeless and representative of the strategic process we implement into our work today. We continue to build campaigns by first understanding the business strategy; when interpreted correctly, this delivers a clear campaign strategy to influence the design and visual language. A business can never make a splash with its brand unless it has a fluid strategic solution.
We’re looking forward to sharing more stories with you over the coming year and if you’re seeking a campaign to make a lasting impact on your business and your competitors.