MR. Procrastinator

ad campaign

Sometimes you read a book on self-development and feel like if you squeezed out all the fluff, the whole point would fit into a few pages.

Luckily, there’s the Headway app, which does exactly that: it gives you the key ideas of all kinds of books in a short, clear format, on self-development, career or relationships.

So, the Headway team came to us asking for an ad campaign for its launch in Canada. The ads would run only on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), so we had to hook viewers from the very first second. This isn’t YouTube, people can skip you instantly.

so what actually stops people from working on themselves?

It’s usually hard and takes time, and it’s so much easier to get stuck in social media. We found tons of tips online on how to beat procrastination, but let’s be honest: we all know you’ll keep procrastinating anyway.

But what if instead of fighting procrastination, you make it work for you? The Headway app is perfect for that, because you can listen or read almost anywhere, anytime.

We tried to imagine what procrastination would look like if it were a character.

Probably like a sloth, we thought. But a very charming sloth, impossible to resist. We started sketching character concepts, and when He finally appeared, we knew: yes, this is Procrastination in the flesh.

We decided almost right away it would be frame-by-frame 2D animation, a format we hadn’t worked with before but really wanted to try. It was a risk and a challenge: tight deadlines and a new format. That only fired us up more.

We made five everyday stories about procrastination (and a cat!) where Procrastination itself talks straight to the viewer, right when they’re scrolling their feed. In other words, procrastinating.

That’s how we made the context work extra hard for the message.