Longborough Festival Opera
Creating an awareness campaign for a World Famous Opera Festival
We knew that, with a small budget, we had to stand out and grab people’s attention. The headlines would be deliberately provocative or questioning, accompanied by equally eye-catching, quirky imagery that would be a million miles away from the “black tie, cucumber sandwiches on the lawn” imagery of other Opera festivals, such as Glyndebourne.
The proposition of world-class opera in a chicken shed was such an incredibly quirky and eccentric idea that it seemed all we needed to do was convey the message in a compelling way that reflected the bohemian nature of the event. People would be desperate to find out more, so right from the start, we all agreed that creating a sense of FOMO was the right answer.
Longborough Opera was the first campaign we were briefed on. It was a great vote of confidence that such a great brand was willing to trust us to create the first advertising campaign it had done in its thirty-year history.
The Artistic Director, Polly, wanted to shake off Longborough's elitist, almost secret nature and instead celebrate what it was really about: the best of English eccentricity. Thus, it combined world-class opera with a punk-like bohemian aesthetic.
The strategy almost wrote itself, “What’s more remarkable, that you can find world-class opera in a converted chicken shed in Gloucestershire or that it’s taken you thirty years to find it?”
The idea of a chicken farmer who built an opera house in a converted chicken shed in a sleepy Cotswold village struck us as a peculiarly English type of eccentricity, and the juxtaposition of sophisticated opera and chickens automatically led us to the area of collage in the tradition of Monty Python and Peter Blake. As soon as we’d come up with the visual of the chicken with an opera singer’s head, we realised we had a great vehicle for illustrating this clash of opposites. The bizarre image of a pink Palladian-style opera house in the middle of the Cotswolds also seemed to sum up the eccentric bohemian attitude that ran through everything Longborough Opera stood for.
When it came to the radio campaign, it seemed there was only one real obvious contender for the voice-over, Stephen Fry, whose voice immediately conjures up the best of English eccentricity and a wonderful balance of authority, warmth and wit.
