FMCG News South Africa

Stop animation now in tea advertisement

Freshpak will be launching a new television commercial early in 2008, which aims to entrench the brand's identity and positioning as a healthy, natural option, with a selection of variants that fall beneath it: rooibos, herbal and green teas.

The TVC will communicate the brand's new pay-off line, “The tea for me. Naturally”. With the use of tea leaves and stop animation, the brand's agency, FoxP2, has come up with a concept that is clean, natural, exciting and different.

Brand manager, Faith Malete, briefed the agency on a solution zoom would communicate her brand's natural, intrinsic credentials and establish it as a Masterbrand, creating awareness that Freshpak extends beyond just rooibos. The solution the agency offered consists of a 30-second television commercial, with the option to cut it down and introduce 10-second tag on's focusing on the different variants.

“We offer a wide range of teas, each with its own unique qualities that help bring balance in today's busy lifestyle, which is something we wish to communicate through the advert”, comments Malete. “Our positioning is also around owning those special “me” moments, and we feel that the advert is successful in communicating this”.

To set the scene, the Freshpak heroine is a health-conscious female, aged between 24 and 35… and if you want to know more, you'll just have to wait for the advertisement, which has been created using stop animation, where everything is made of moving tea leaves.

“It was of utmost importance the ad should communicate Freshpak's revive and restore elements – but at the same time, we wanted to find an innovative way of highlighting the natural and wholesome nature of our tea. To achieve this, we decided to tell the story in moving tea leaves,” says FoxP2 Creative Director Andrew Whitehouse.

Animation studio Masters and Savant took this idea of using tea in stop animation a step further by combining it with generated 3D animation.

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