Koala: Never Uncomfortable

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.

• 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.