Embrace The Dark
Adelaide Film Festival goes to war with the couch!
The Challenge
Forget multiplexes, Adelaide Film Festival is competing with multi-screens. Screens at home, screens in lifts, screens in people’s pockets, with some of the world’s best content streaming 24/7 (depending on your platform preference). To carve out time from busy people’s days, kwpx worked with Adelaide Film Festival to define an authentic and persuasive point of difference.
Going deeper than the usual, “it’s a curated selection of world-class cinema,” kwpx led a group of intrepid AFF stakeholders on a Deep Day™ with the aim of discovering their unique place in the world and defining the language we believed had the best chance of getting people give up their couch and get into a cinema for the festival.
The Solution
The kwpx Deep Day™ delivered a strategic playbook and lexicon Adelaide Film Festival has slowly and steadily built into all their communications. 2023’s theme, “See in the dark” brought to life in the festival’s graphics by Marco Cicchiani, comes directly from the Deep Day we held in 2022.
AFF’s place is “the dark”. Where else can you come face-to-face with your sense of morality, your taste for lust, and urge for adventure but in the dark of the cinema, surrounded by the most exotic, exciting, and thriving cinema in the world.
Far from an exclusive rule book that gives our agency the monopoly over AFF’s marketing and brand, the Deep Day™ and resulting playbook has empowered AFF in myriad ways.
From fundraising and onboarding, through to program writing and design. Using the playbook, kwpx crafted both the 2022 and 2023 trailer for the festival.
The Result
Last year’s festival not only smashed box office records, but the AFF organisation was also successful in its budget bit to the South Australian Government for funding to “go annual” as well as doubling its Investment Fund.
Having a structured and strategic narrative has helped AFF continue to build its incredible momentum under the command of CEO and Creative Director Mat Kesting and his team of collaborators, philanthropists, and consultants.
The brand strategy and narrative work kwpx did for AFF is stunning. In supporting AFF with their corporate partnership program we came across the newly developed narrative, and suddenly, AFF’s functional excellence, that it is renowned for, became wrapped in a powerful story that added untold emotion and inspiration to the package.
The potential for its application is enormous. Kudos to all involved.
