Lebara Mobile
Lebara Mobile is a large telecom-provider which mainly aims at the non-native target group in the Netherlands and beyond. Lebara approached us with the request to develop and produce three TV-commercials for the Netherlands, Turkey and Morocco, intended to boost sales of the prepaid telephone cards.
Brainstorming
It soon became clear, in the brainstorm sessions with Lebara, that the Turkish and Moroccan clip needed be made very land- and culture-based. Thus the question arose as to what sort of commercials these needed to become. Humour in advertising works, that’s a proven fact, but if you start to make up jokes for people from another culture, you risk a complete detriment rather than a successful joke. We decided to shoot three contemporary, modern clips that would appeal to a broad age-based target group.
Concept
One of Lebara’s USPs is the P for Price. With Lebara, you can cheaply telephone everywhere, anywhere. We developed two commercials in which two young and trendy girls call with their families abroad. From a bench in the park. As they are telephoning, time flies by, which is shown in the rapidly changing background. Meanwhile, the protagonist is extremely leisurely on the line. For this commercial, we cast two young, beautiful and modern girls who are in the middle of our society. We chose the safe road and used a headcloth, which led to great consternation with our main characters, for they never wore one, themselves. The third clip became a more common commercial, in which we filmed people from all sorts of cultures at a tram stop in Amsterdam, who were all calling with Lebara Mobile. The commercial was ended with an action, which were free telephone-minutes.
Shooting
All of the shooting took place in Amsterdam. Part of the shooting for the Turkish and Moroccan commercials were recorded in a studio, in front of a green screen. Afterwards, we filmed the background in the Oosterpark in the city centre of Amsterdam. A crispy detail: we were shooting in the street where Theo van Gogh was murdered. The shoot at the tram stop nearly blew up in our face. All was taken care of: crew, cast, equipment, location… Everybody was ready for some action. But the action had taken place somewhere up the line, where a car crash caused the tram to be delayed several hours. Oh yes, the filming industry is full of surprises.
Editing
When we got to editing the clip, we had to reach deep into our top hat for some white rabbits and additional tricks. The Nokia brand logo needed to be invisible in close-up, the telephone number the leading lady entered had to be added to the image and the subtle yet undeniably present piece of nose-jewellery had to be brushed away. Gone like an ice-cream-cone in the Sahara! And the sign in the background of the tram stop originally featured a completely different text, so we pasted the Lebara poster there, instead. Put your hands together for technology!
Success
Eventually, the three commercials were broadcast both on a number of international channels through satellite-TV, as well as on all local Dutch TV-channels. And successfully, at that! Resulting in a considerable boost in turnover for Lebara. Which is, in the end, why we do this thing.
