To develop an engaging in-cinema creative for viewers to take home, and to raise awareness of Volkswagen’s long-running ‘See Film Differently’ campaign. These should feel like a natural part of the indie cinema environment, have cut through with the film buffs that attend indie cinemas and convey our ‘different take on film’. The campaign tone of voice should have Volkswagen’s usual humour and intelligence.

To reflect Volkswagen’s integration with independent cinema we created 10 napkin designs; scribbled ideas fresh from filmmakers’ minds. This allowed cinemagoers to stumble upon the napkins in bars and foyers, giving them the feeling of discovering a piece of film history. The back-of-a-napkin scribbles give an insight into the thought process that producer, scriptwriters, costume-designers etc. could have been through when making iconic film decisions. To make the designs feel authentic, we used illustrators from different backgrounds, such as costume-design and composing. Film titles are not directly referenced in the scribbles, encouraging viewers to work them out for themselves.

The desired response of this activity was to increase people’s liking and consideration for Volkswagen. To test this, Volkswagen commissioned research that compared opinions towards the brand of recent attendees of independent cinemas with a demographically matched sample. Results showed a statistically significant increase in consideration, as well as a number of other important brand-image metrics such as ‘innovation’ and ‘for people like me’. Cinemas also reported that many cinema-goers started to collect each design, some even calling up to ask for more. In fact there was so much demand; we had to print a second batch across 190 venues.