Date: November 2023
Roles: Creative, Design, Art direction, Strategy
Leap Wild are a part of New England Seafood Incorporated (NESI) alongside Fish Said Fred. Leap revealed their outrageous new TV advert featuring Big Mouth Billy Bass. For those who don’t know, Big Mouth Billy Bass is an iconic novelty toy created by Gemmi Toy Company. He is A rubber fish mounted on a wall plaque which sings and flaps to music. Leap wanted Global to create and deliver an outdoor campaign around the new TV ad.
The TV ad was so strong, with its bespoke rewrite of “Be Our Guest” sung by Billy Bass, that initially we did not stray too far from using images from the commercial. We discussed using the multiple Outdoor advertising billboard sites of the Waterloo corridor site in the fashion of a storyboard for the advert. However, the more I watched the commercial, the more I questioned the sense in having a rubber fish as the hero of a brand which sells wild caught fish, not farmed. The video has a vintage feel, the decor was retro and dark; a stark contrast to Leap’s clean, light image. I had to know more!
Bronze in The Drum Awards 2024 Disruption Category
“Breaking the boundaries in a campaign of firsts, LEAP has launched its biggest campaign to date, with the UK’s largest roadside animatronic billboard at the UK’s busiest train station...”
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Concept
Working along side Anthony Riley, Donna Fisk and Nicola Goulder from Global, we spoke to the creative director at Lola in Spain, the video company who made the TV ad. They told me that Billy was the villain in the scenario. He represented the rubbery farmed fish. The style of the furnishing chosen in the video represents “bad taste”, this is written into the song in the end line which says “Go on and take the Leap, don’t eat a fish like me, just take the leap, take the leap, take the LEEEEEEEEEAP!”.
The marketing team at Leap were obviously very keen to pull the TV commercial into this large outdoor campaign as much as possible. Putting Billy Bass on ice for the moment, for the first set of designs, I explored ideas around how to include references to the TV advert into the static designs. I loved the idea of using “Take the Leap!” as a call to action on the print designs, referring to both selecting Leap as a product and making the switch from farmed to wild fish. I took the musical score from ‘Be our guest’, and wrote the notation around various lines from the Leap Wild version of the song as a visual cue and recall to the song in the TV commercial.
True,! The TV advert is totally unforgettable. A real ear-worm delivered straight from the mouth of an iconic fish. However, with Leap being a brand which was fairly new to the market, I felt we were in danger of finding ourselves in murky water around the look and feel of the brand in the long-term on the outdoor campaign by using the dark imagery from the video in the short term. However, Billy was a great intrigue feature which we wanted exploit to drive the audience to view the new TV commercial. So the third set of designs featured Billy Bass and the simple call to action of “Watch the Full story”, with a QR code where Health and Safety limitations would allow.
The marketing team at Leap were obviously very keen to pull the TV commercial into this large outdoor campaign as much as possible. Putting Billy Bass on ice for the moment, for the first set of designs, I explored ideas around how to include references to the TV advert into the static billboard design. I loved the idea of using “Take the Leap!” as a call to action on the print designs, referring to both selecting Leap as a product and making the switch from farmed to wild fish. I took the musical score from ‘Be our guest’, and wrote the notation around various lines from the Leap Wild version of the song as a visual cue and recall to the song in the TV commercial.
True! The TV advert is totally unforgettable. A real ear-worm delivered straight from the mouth of an iconic fish. However, with Leap being a brand which was fairly new to the market, I felt we were in danger of finding ourselves in murky water around the look and feel of the brand in the long-term on the outdoor campaign by using the dark imagery from the video in the short term. However, Billy was a great intrigue feature which we wanted exploit to drive the audience to view the new TV commercial. So the third set of designs featured Billy Bass and the simple call to action of “Watch the Full story”, with a QR code where Health and Safety limitations would allow.
Back to Billy...
We utilised the location of the Waterloo station, where we had access to a power supply and a large viewing area, to have a huge 3D, animatronic Big Mouth Billy Bass made by the team who build large 3D models for Disney World. This huge OOH installation would move and and sing lines from the commercial to London’s commuters every 3 minutes. I am proud to say This is one of the first fully automated animatronic 3D Billboards in the U.K.
"I am proud to say This is one of the first fully automated animatronic 3D Billboards in the U.K."
The Bait...
The Waterloo corridor, is a set of 16 billboards around Waterloo station. We used all of them to tell the story of Leap Wild. We plotted out the site, the likely routes to and from the station and based on our findings, split the 16 sites into 5 groupings. These groups consisted of 3 or 4 sites which a typical route would take you past. Using this data we used the 3 sets of designs of create a “loop” of the intrigue piece with Billy bass and the QR or call to action to watch the full story, followed by the product shots, finally the recipe designs with different lines from the Take the leap / be our guest song. This meant that from most vantage points or commuter routes you would take the journey from the farmed Billy Bass fish, to the free swimming leap wild product, to the recipe on the plate. Bringing to life the song lyrics “Here at leap, we believe, that the best fish all swim free, from deepest wildest oceans, to your home, bon appetit!”
