Deutsche Telekom briefed Saatchi & Saatchi to promote Electronic Beats, their music and entertainment arm, aimed to a much younger audience. They were looking for a platform for these young consumers that could deliver everything, from exclusive tracks to tickets to private gigs.

Intuitively, when answering a brief like this, we default to making things that aren't heavily branded, especially if we need to appeal to the younger audience. In this brief wasn't different. The first iteration and responses were ideas that didn't put the brand first, and led to feedback such as "we need more magenta”.

Magenta is our key brand asset. Recognisable everywhere, and we made it irresistible by giving it another dimension. Using simple chroma key technology, “The Lenz”, our AR app, turned everything magenta into a screen for music, lifestyle and promotional content.

To launch this new dimension to magenta, we partnered with Gorillaz, the world’s biggest virtual band. Anything magenta became a portal to share exclusive tracks, live gigs and product offers.

The Lenz app became the hub for this entire campaign, giving magenta a whole new dimension. We've partnered up with B-Reel to develop this "Chroma Key" type technology and AR experience, while we kept the design development closer to us, as we had other pieces of the puzzle being created at the same time.

The key part for us was to make this app super simple to use. For the user, it had to feel as simple as point the camera and find magenta. Under the hood, we had to create a robust backend that transformed this into a platform that could deliver exclusive content, geo-located content, object recognition and even live streams.

Magenta Takeover

Once the app part was defined, it was time to plan a complete Magenta takeover, where overnight, magenta portals appeared in different parts of Europe. For this launch piece, we took over trains, taxis, famous touristic spots and traditional formats such as OOH.

Press and OOH

After the successful launch of the app, I had the opportunity to create a series of posters featuring Jamie Hewlett's illustrations. The process was complicated as involved a lot of moving pieces, and the contact with the artist was limited, but in the end, we created some pieces that then became part of the second phase of this campaign, advertising the app and also some secret gigs that could be seen through the app.