Campaign Trail: Journeys amps up absurdity to break back-to-school conventions

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Campaign Trail: Journeys amps up absurdity to break back-to-school conventions

Anomaly helped imagine the first day of school at its most musically surreal while building on the retailer’s brand platform.

Campaign Trail is our analysis of some of the best new creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.

Last year, Journeys launched its “Life on Loud” brand platform by reimagining New Radicals’ 1998 hit “You Get What You Give” in a throwback music video. For this year’s back-to-school campaign, the Genesco shoe retailer used music video logic for a “Don't Just Show Up. Turn Up” campaign that is even louder.

A 30-second hero video captures the first day of school at its most musically surreal. Students arrive at school by bus, speaker-loaded bike or horseback; individuals are followed by personal DJs, play five-necked guitars and surf on keyboards. The lunchline serves up sneakers and one student’s head is given a claymation makeover.

The effort was developed in collaboration with Stagwell shop Anomaly, which also crafted last year’s brand platform. The video was directed by artist Max Siedentopf, with hand-rendered effects by animation partner Slow Bureau. The campaign, running across TV and social, also includes three 15-second cutdowns, multiple six-second spots crafted for short-form social platforms and a social-first influencer program.

Apart from a desire to go bigger and louder than last year’s campaign, “Don't Just Show Up. Turn Up” was inspired by two things: a fine art photograph that mixed medical and musical tropes and a blog post in defense of brain rot that posited the digital material favored by Gen Z and Gen Alpha is how young people are responding to an increasingly absurd reality.

“We're obviously making a back-to-school film, let’s make a back-to-school film that embraces that absurdity in terms of imagination — not speaking Gen Z language or explaining memes or ripping off memes — but really trying to be inspired by that as a creative pillar for the work,” explained Leanne Amann, group creative director at Anomaly.

Drawing inspiration from ‘90s music videos directed by Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham allowed the agency to speak about the brand’s DNA and to young consumers without relying on the tropes of other back-to-school marketing.

“When people show up as themselves, they're not bending to the world — the world's bending to them and their creativity. That became a really inspiring blank canvas for us to get into our own kid-like imagination,” Amann said of the creative process. “When you're going back to school, it can feel like the end of freedom, and we wanted it to feel like the start of it… not in a cheesy way, but in a way that feels slightly rebellious.”

Fun on set leads to fun on film

While Anomaly had a lot of white space to let their creativity run wild, the team avoided concepts that were weird for weird’s sake and didn’t want the craft to be chaotic, no matter how out-there the ideas were. That led to a creative partnership with Siedentopf, who has a background in installation art and a knowledge of practical world-building. Most effects in the final product were made in camera, apart from some hand-rendered effects reminiscent of ‘90s MTV claymation.

“We held ourselves to this idea of just following the fun. The minute it started to feel like marketing fingerprints were on it, It would feel off,” Amann said. “It was fun making it, and I think when you have fun making it, the work feels fun, as well. It doesn't feel belabored, and it wasn't.”

The team encouraged a playful attitude on set by blasting a playlist of songs that were options for the final ad. The winning selection, “Ludvig Van” by British DJ-producer Star Slinger, received the best response. The jumpy electronic dance track, which samples both Beethoven and the film “A Clockwork Orange,” has a genre-defying quality inline with Journeys’ brand ethos.

“Other brands in the retail category have their image of their person, and Journeys doesn't want to do that. We really want people to come as they are and be able to express themselves,” said Amann, whose voice is featured on the version of the track used in the ad.

That sense of unfettered self-expression is also maintained by the brand ambassadors and creator partners who appear in the ad, including pro skateboarder Sky Brown, musician Inji and actor Madison Bailey, who plays a set of differently styled triplets in the video. The team worked to cast people who were not precious about their image, willing to be playful with how they show up and experiment with their own personal style.

“Using that as a lens for the casting of the influencers, we were able to land on people from acting, music and skate backgrounds that actually all work together,” Amann said. “That, again, laddered up to that rule we had about making sure things stayed fun. They had a lot of fun on set.”

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