Import legislation is about as dense as subject matter gets, and the Office for Product Safety and Standards needed people to actually watch it. Over two campaigns through my agency, Indigo Productions, I gave them a standout animation series in year one, then ‘Meet Tess’ in year two, a tongue-in-cheek follow-up shot deliberately lo-fi.
Tess is an over-the-top ‘importer’ with no patience for the rules, played to maximum and shot deliberately lo-fi so the films feel native to the social feed. Year one’s animations landed so well that OPSS came back asking for quirky and viral. She delivered.
Inside the Department for Business and Trade sits the Office for Product Safety and Standards, the national regulator for consumer product safety, and its subject matter is import legislation: dense, technical and genuinely critical for any business bringing goods into the country. The audience that most needs it is the audience least likely to sit through it. OPSS wanted communications people would actually watch, with none of the substance watered down, and they wanted it twice: an animation campaign in year one, then something quirky and viral to follow it.
I directed both campaigns through Indigo. Year one meant building an animation series with its own visual language, nothing like the template explainers government audiences have learned to scroll past. Two of those films, Overview to Importing and The Rules, are in the reel below. Year two flipped the approach entirely: Tess, a gloriously over-the-top importer character, shot lo-fi on purpose so the films felt at home in the feeds they were made for. Opposite tones, same job: turning complicated rules into something people choose to watch.
The animation series pulled in more than 235,000 views inside its first month. Tess went further still: views up 300% on campaign one, click-throughs up 160%, and just short of a million plays in little over a month. Between them, the two campaigns changed what the Department for Business and Trade thinks government content can look like, and did it without losing an ounce of regulatory rigour.