The new creative expression builds on the best of the brand – its warmth and accessibility.

It centres around video and photography, replacing illustrations that had lost much of their Skype identity in a crowded environment. Art direction takes cues from how real users look on video calls; we cast regular people, used odd crops, showed just hints of environments (a lamp shade, the tilt of a bookshelf) to keep the focus on people and their interactions. Also, unless showcasing a hardware partnership, devices are never pictured. All verbal and visual language is unmannered and ‘everyday’.

Gary Bramall, Global Senior Director of Brand and Creative at Skype said: "Over the years the consultancy has helped us shape our brand. It’s now something we use every day to steer business decisions, to influence product direction, even to structure our organization. Ultimately this has helped Skype make the transition to become a valuable part of Microsoft."

The creative expression has successfully been applied across Skype’s significant Facebook community (it has approximately 27 million fans) and also offers a suggestion of how the brand might be expressed through film such as YouTube spots and banner ads.

The consultancy has been Skype’s brand partner since 2009, half of Skype’s lifetime. Everyone knows Skype for the free video service more than for the full communications suite. The objective was to convert occasional users into regular users by showing the full breadth of Skype’s features, from messaging and sharing to video and audio calls. Our ambition was to show just how useful the full range of Skype can be everyday versus using video call on the odd occasion.

Skype has earned the authority to tell stories and so our creative expression is built around little, human narratives and by enhancing this sense of the everyday across the creative expression, we’re reinforcing an approach that is true to Skype and how people interact with it. Rather than slick and aspirational, the work we’ve developed is all deliberately loose, with a fly-on-the-wall and unpolished feel