Brand Video

Koala: Never Uncomfortable

We teamed up with Koala for the fifth time to create a 2:30min long-form ad to be distributed in full length through Youtube Pre-Roll Ads, and in shorter cutdowns through Facebook and Instagram.

Michael Beveridge
Koala does creative that appeals to consumers, not award show judges, and I think that’s why our video creative is continually considered the benchmark by Facebook and Youtube – our click through rates, our view through rates and our conversion rates are were top notch. + Winner of Platinum Muse Award + Youtube Pre-Roll Campaign & TVC
Michael Beveridge
Creative Director
Hilarious and relatable.

Hilarious and relatable.

This project was significant. It represented the first time that Koala, a company near Sydney would be known as a wider furniture company, and not just a mattress brand with a single product.

There’s a tonne of furniture companies who have already saturated the market across television and Youtube — we needed a way to stand out with a clear differentiation in both offering, tone and brand values. Our mission was to do this in the most hilarious and memorable way possible.

That’s when the idea for Never Uncomfortable was born. The campaign addresses how the comfort of Koala’s furniture can help make ‘uncomfortable’ subjects like bedroom performance, unexpected pregnancy, and coming out to your parents — feel better.

Beyond standard KPIs.

Beyond standard KPIs.

The campaign was Koala’s most cost-efficient in terms of lifting purchase consideration, and following their brand uplift study, Koala had an overall lift in Positive Response Rate of 20%, which is massive, considering where Koala sits in the market.

It simply outperformed work that is likely 4-5x the budget — there’s a huge value component that both teams figured out when it comes to long-form content.

For low-differentiation products like mattresses, we attribute a lot of that success to how largely differentiated their creative and marketing is. This might seem easy but it’s really not.

Winning elements.

Winning elements.

  • Long durations = yield more assets. With the exception of the first TV campaign (which was purely a 30sec spot that used only one shot and some very well considered animations with a tight-as-hell script), all of the brand videos with Koala have been long. At 2-2:30mins, they are unusually long for promotional video content. What this meant however is the return you get in terms of assets is huge. It’s common that we are able to cut-down 2-3 x 30sec spots, and 2-3 x 15sec spots. What was originally an allocated budget for 1 video, now turned into 7 videos, all specifically tuned for their own distribution channels.
  • They’re fast. Average shot duration in a Koala video is 2-2.5secs per frame, which is close to the pace of a Jason Bourne thriller in terms of shot frequency if we’re not mistaken. After how well these videos have performed, we wouldn’t be comfortable producing a video for Youtube ads that was too far from this formula. Youtube demands a high, exciting pace — unless your copy is top-shelf, slow videos are often punished.
  • Mixed media = variance = high engagement. One thing people notice about these videos (and most of the content in our portfolio) is the convergence of different video executions like live-action, animation, still assets and typography. It’s easy to call this approach mixed media. It turns out that just having a great pace to your video above is only half the story. There needs to be enough variance in your visuals to avoid viewing fatigue. This is also harder than it looks, because if you create variance without unity or brand continuity, the whole video can turn bad. This is where we’ve leaned on design principles as much as possible, which is evident in the big, nicely branded typography you see in Koala videos. Still images or found footage can also be turned mono-tone in colour as a quick fix.
  • Colloquialism = familiarity = brand feels more like a ‘mate’/friend = completely elevates the efficacy of the creative. This is arguably what makes these videos so damn good. If we said that the videos had some sort of ‘secret-sauce’, it would be this. We can’t take all the credit, as Michael Beveridge (Koala) and Charlie Gearside (now Eucalyptus) have incredible cultural awareness, sense of tone, and copy.
Platinum Muse Award.

Platinum Muse Award.

Our work for Never Uncomfortable won a Muse Award! Pretty cool as we are alongside some of the top production companies in the world with this win.

Although creative awards are great, client outcomes come first. We see there being a lot of misused spend when it comes to the typical video production model, where the focus isn’t on outright performance — at the end of the day, it’s about generating real returns for clients. It’s all that really matters.

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