Film festivals often feel pretentious, exclusive, and inaccessible to the general public. Our task was to make The Chicago International Film Festival feel different – inclusive, accessible and welcoming to all.

To invite people from all walks of life to our Festival, we created a contextual OOH campaign that used short screenplays to narrate the everyday happenings of the city. The stars? Ordinary people.

We scripted life everywhere, from bus shelters to childcare centers. We even scripted our festival itself, surprising attendees with an interactive digital board that narrated the night in real-time.

In the end, we gave our audience the most important role in the festival — and showed that every one of us has a story worth telling.

Each piece of the campaign—from the wild postings to bus shelters to the live activation outside a movie theater during the festival —was hyper-targeted to specific locations and, when possible, even specific individuals.

The campaign happened over the span of 3 weeks in October, ahead of and during the film festival. The posters appeared on bus shelters and wild postings across the city, from downtown to smaller neighborhoods on the North, South, and West sides.

Our out of home campaign generated 2.6m impressions from locations across the city of Chicago.