The past is a potentially dangerous place in advertising. If you go too far back everything is rife for parody, but if you don’t go back far enough, nostalgia can dilute your message. VCCP Sydney have opened a unique window to the past here, however, by appealing to our emotions in a defiantly direct and surprisingly powerful way. They looked to fictional characters from the past in their latest campaign for Ancestry, the UK’s largest family history site. The site uses bespoke family history technology and unique DNA profiling in order to give its users a complete and elaborate insight into their family trees, and the new campaign underlines what the site has to offer by asking viewers to connect with their ancestors across time.
Barrow Girl
Three separate ads feature an 1888 Barrow Girl (Costermonger), a 1788 First Fleet Convict and an 11th Century Viking leader named Kolbjorn who speaks in his native tongue of Old Norse. The spots pose the questions: What if our ancestors could connect with us across time? What if we came face to face with people from the past? What would they look like? Sound like? And what stories would they have to tell? The new campaign will work across TV, Digital and Social, with Ancestry, VCCP and production partners Moth, to bring these colourful characters from the past alive, and to allow our ancestors to make passionate appeals for us to connect directly with them. It’s all lightly comical, but in a manner that shows off exactly what the site is about, and what makes it so unique.
VCCP Sydney have looked to characters from the past in their latest campaign for Ancestry, the UK’s largest family history site
VCCP founding creative director Dean Hunt said of the “Come Find Me” campaign: “Each of these moving portraits is a simple call to action. A message from the past asking us to connect. We get a taste of each person’s world at their time in history, and hint of their story. We get to experience the fear of our First Fleet convict; the optimistic resolve of our Barrow Girl; and the raw danger of the Viking. Effectively this is a brand campaign with a simple direct response twist, brought to life with great production values and meaty performances. Working with Ancestry, Moth, and historians of each period, the team worked hard to recreate accurate art department, wardrobe and dialogue, to really do justice to the ancestors of real Australians and New Zealanders.”
Viking
Ancestry country director, Kelly Godfrey, added: “Some of us will know our immediate family history, but very few of us know about our family stories that go back hundreds of years. Ancestry’s family history website and new DNA profiling product allow us to find out who we are and go way back to where our family story began, down to our actual DNA make-up, region by region. We think the work does a brilliant job of inviting every Australian and New Zealander to look into their past to see what they will discover. ”
Three separate ads feature an 1888 Barrow Girl (Costermonger), a 1788 First Fleet Convict and an 11th Century Viking leader named Kolbjorn
The campaign will launch with three 30 second spots and will be supported with three 15 second DR spots, plus behind the scenes films, digital & social support. Ancestry is the world’s largest online family history resource with more than 2 million subscribers across its websites worldwide. The Ancestry DNA test has been taken by around 1 million customers globally.
Convict
Benjamin Hiorns is a freelance writer and struggling musician from the UK who once attempted to track down his own family tree and found out he was distantly related to Cherie Blair. Needless to say he wasn’t particularly impressed
