On the rocks


︎by Thea Norman, Senior Motion Designer




When do you feel inspired?

First of all, let me share my excitement for idea generation and strong original concepts all rooting in inspiration. Inspiration is like a magical force that has a marvelous influence on us and it can cause us to create things that we did not think were possible. "Wow please calm down, woman. Get to the point already." Sure I'm calm, however my point is – and you probably know this too – that a great idea can hide in the strangest places, but it takes practice to connect what inspired that idea and the problem you're solving. 🧠

In this creative efforts case, the inspiration seemed a bit like a Eureka! moment. It was a fine example of how the source of inspiration led directly to the idea.

But also an example how a creative team seized the opportunity to unfold, put together the creative brief and build a concept from idea to execution ourselves.

This summer Pleo raised the biggest Series C investment in Denmark. But so many companies raise money all the time. So how do we announce that we have raised $150 million without the message drowning in the endless scrolling?

There we had our problem...

"Oh, and by the way we don't have much time.”




One of the greatest abilities you have as a creative is to see contexts. To begin to see the connection between different things and your problem. What is the connection between a banana and the problem you are solving?

🍌


The less obvious the connection between two things in the first place, the more surprising the solution. In order to get an original idea, you probably have to approach the problem in a different way than the obvious one, ie. use a tool I know from school, a Mindmap, which is a good tool for not thinking linearly and can quickly generate a few original ideas if you manage to implement this method in the very initial phase of concept development.

As a starting point, we chose to highlight the most unique statement in the message we were going to send out; The absolute biggest investment ever in Danish history!

From a mindmap to a brainstorm we finally figured that working with biggest ever analogies is something all people will recognize and humor arises when we see the connection between two things that usually have nothing to do with each other.


From biggest Boss man, biggest thumbs up to biggest shoulders and ties ever for a business reference to something that actually and suddenly seemed doable within this little timeframe; connecting the location of the shoot to our idea. Let’s announce this on the biggest rock ever* in Denmark and hereby connect that to the message!


And since we couldn’t get a hold of Dwayne, The Rock, Johnson let’s get our own famous CEO in there, even better, to announce this BIG achievement. As a Dane I was highlighting considerations on what would resonate with a Danish sense of humor, which was quite important too.

Being quite literally down to earth, but confident and proud. Yes, it’s a huge deal, but we know we didn’t get here alone. You could say it’s a clean slate, all while staying true to our mission: making people feel valued at work.


From research we found out that the biggest rock in Denmark was too far away for us to travel there on the tight schedule we had. Luckily we found a very impressive and big rock with a site that fit our needs for the shoot just outside of Copenhagen. While the script was being created and processed from there it was all about creating storyboards, planning out direction and shooting. We had to move fast and a lot of things had to be held into account like availability and especially weather forecasts. So for the planning of the shoot we ended up having a plan A, B, C and D.






For this to be a thumbstopper on Linkedin we wanted Jeppe to be in the shot in a closeup and we animated elements to add playfullness to the video. From there the “big reveal” should appear quite quickly as an aha-moment.




For those who stuck around until the end let me share this point: The secret to "feeling inspired" is to be able to see the connection between the sources of inspiration and the problem to be solved.

Over and out. <3



© Pleo 2023