Brief Explanation

Rather than shroud our message in an overly elaborate execution, the intelligence of the idea lay in its delivery: our ad, forever on their office walls, like a Trojan horse. It had to read like the real thing. A powerfully articulated, thought-provoking, chest-thumping, manifesto – succinct enough for a poster, with a story to resonate with anyone, of any role or experience level.

The Brief

Circus Festival is a three-day event for Australian marketers hosted by the Communications Council. To convince CMOs that this festival was worthy of the elusive staff training budget, we had to engage them in a meaningful way, long before the event. So we created the philosophy of Circuit Breaking. The design challenge was to deliver our provocative mantras in a DM piece too precious for the wastepaper basket. It had to feel important, permanent, and function as a creative tool. More than an ad, it had to be a work of art.

How the final design was conceived

Among the UK’s finest typographers, Anthony Burrill is renowned for designing mantras to inspire the creatively inclined. He was the ideal typographer for our punchy messages. Every character was hand-set and physically screwed together in a traditional woodblock printing process at Adams of Rye, London. The fonts hail from the days of the news press, so to present multiple fonts in a stripped back, unconventional way was our method of ‘breaking the circuit’. Between the variety of paper colours, and arbitrary outcomes of the press, no two posters were exactly alike. Frames were handmade by local artisan woodworkers, United Measures.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

Our high value DM pieces were sent to a select group of CMOs, chosen for their commitment to creativity. 44% of them attended a Circus Festival event. But the CMOs were just the beginning. Our philosophy had infiltrated the ranks of their staff and advertising agencies. By the time the event was announced above the line, a significant portion of its audience already knew what to expect. After the first prints were delivered we fielded requests from other marketing departments and advertising agencies, both in Australia and abroad. Our audience was paying money to put our advertising on the wall.