Atomic London on Star Alliance Branded Content

Guy Bradbury, executive creative director at Atomic London

What was the brief from Star Alliance?

On May 14^th the world’s largest airline alliance, Star Alliance marked its 20th Anniversary. But rather than create another corporate birthday, their brief to us was to inspire business travellers like never before, showing how 28 member airlines come together to connect people and cultures around the world.

For you, what is the message behind the campaign?

The whole thought behind this campaign was to encourage people to push themselves out of their comfort zones when they travel to new places. Not just to go on a business trip and stay in the same 5 star hotel and eat in the same Michelin starred restaurant. But to switch off the auto pilot and really get under the skin of a place, walk down a street they haven’t walked down before and embrace the culture.

How did you achieve this?

To do this we partnered with National Geographic and Wall Street Journal Custom Studios to create a branded content series called Connecting Cultures, featuring National Geographic’s ‘Digital Nomad’, Robert Reid.

Our challenge was, where do you take a guy like Robert who has been everywhere?

As part of the casting, we tried to get under the skin of Robert - how far was he prepared to go? How far could we push him? And (with the exception of not eating anything alive) he was up for pretty much anything. He also told us he wasn’t great in the cold, afraid of heights and had never thrown a punch in his life. Which gave us our inspiration in each location.

As a result we challenged Robert to escape the hotel gym and visit a local Muay Thai gym… to fight a Bangkok champion.

We put his fear of heights to the test by challenging him to scale 40m high rooftops and see Stockholm from a new perspective.

In Canada, we made him build his own hotel room, spending an evening with the local Inui people, whilst temperatures plummeted to  -50. That was genuinely insane. 

Whilst in Georgia we challenged Robert to take part in the local horse race, in Europe’s highest village, Ushguli, at an altitude of 6,900 feet. Thankfully he lived to tell the tail.

And the end result are a set of films, with a great Kevin Spacey-type voice, which we hope will inspire our audience to try new things for themselves.

What did working with a journalist like Robert Reid teach you?

A huge part of the success of this project was working with Jim Percy, creative director at WSJ Custom Studios. And what we both realised very early on was that although we can create an outline script, the less we told Robert about what he was about to face the better.

His spontaneous reactions to each cultural challenge, his nervous looks to camera and excitement can be felt rather than acted, which brings a genuine authenticity to the films.

The second thing that added to the success of this campaign was the tightness and nimbleness of a crew, which was made up of one DOP, one superb drone operator and a sound guy. This allowed us to shoot and move fast, catch a moment, and evolve the storyline as Robert got under the skin of each place.

As a result what we managed to capture was an experience seen through the eyes of Robert, drawing the audience in to each film.  And delivering high quality branded content at a fraction of the cost of using TV commercial production.

What one thing would you have liked Robert Reid to do in these video that you weren’t able to fit into the series?

As you can imagine we had many cultural experiences and challenges in mind for Robert. From taking part in Da Shuhua, a 300-year-old Chinese tradition, where performers throw molten iron onto the cold brick of the city gate creating sparks, like thousands of fire flowers.  To joining the Omo tribe in Ethiopia and learning the art of bee whispering. In the end we had to limit the shoot to just 5 films, one each for Star Alliances 5 founding members.  With the hope that we will create more in the future. Walk down a few more streets and show more of what the world has to offer if you take the time to connect with people and cultures.