Chicago International Film Festival is the longest running competitive film festival in North America. It aims to enrich Chicago’s cultural environment by presenting film in contexts that encourage discussion and debate.

So for the 59th edition of the festival, the brief was simple. To create an engaging OOH poster campaign that invites those who love debating films – the film lovers, the critics, to experience the film festival this year.

Chicago International Film Festival has a history of showcasing a wide variety of films that inspire debate amongst the film goers. Also, America’s most famous film critics were Chicago-based Siskel & Ebert, known for their sharp and biting wit, and heated arguments.

To support this obsession and generate interest at the 59th Chicago International Film Festival, we created Critics Welcome – a campaign that brought the art of film criticism to everyday life through ruthless, self-criticizing OOH.

Since the creative idea became all about bringing the art of film criticism to everyday life through self-criticizing OOH, every aspect of our OOH posters reflected that. From mundane design to very ordinary type – each element was intended to draw more criticism. The writing became the hero, entertaining our viewers and tickling their cynical and funny bone.

Critics Welcome was targeted towards a very niche audience – the international film lovers. It was deliberately designed to tickle their cynical bone in an entertaining way.

The idea was born from the insight that as the hometown of many legendary film critics like the most famous duo, Siskel and Ebert, Chicago loves debating film. So in the spirit of celebrating the art of film criticism, we got everyone in Chicago discussing film.

Because people who discuss films, go to every film they can. Even the bad ones.

The campaign went live on 18th September for almost a month through different media channels. While it was mostly OOH, it extended on to wild postings, social media, direct mailers and even news channels. There were 524 pieces that were deployed across OOH, wild postings and posters throughout the city of Chicago.

• The 59th Chicago International Film Festival saw a record 14% increase in ticket sales compared to last year.

• The website views went up by 25%, to a whopping 1,023,013.

• Total earned media impressions were around 1.54 billion.

• For the very first time, the average age of the audience got younger – it had more Gen Z and younger millennials than previous years. A generation used to TikTok and short form was highly engaged with our longform ads everywhere.