Overview
In 2015, at Solid Agency, I designed and animated rain-triggered digital billboards for Helly Hansen’s #weloverain campaign in Oslo, and produced the rest of the campaign material.
- Digital billboards: Retouched, composited and animated supplied photos into billboard ads that looked like the rain outside.
- Campaign material: Designed in-store prints and decals, web banners, social media ads and newspaper ads.
When it rains…
When you sell rain clothes, the weather decides when people want to buy. Helly Hansen wanted to lift sales of its rainwear in the roughly 170 stores of the Norwegian sports retailers G-Sport and G-Max. The outdoor media company Clear Channel approached us needing to visualise and produce a campaign concept: digital billboards across Oslo that only ran when it rained, reaching people at the moment they needed a rain jacket. A rain sensor on the roof of Clear Channel's office in Stortingsgata controlled the billboards, turning them on as soon as the rain started.
At Solid Agency, I did the visualisation, design and production, working with the campaign teams at Helly Hansen and Clear Channel. I created the billboard ads from photos supplied to us. I retouched them in Photoshop, then composited and animated them in After Effects to create motion, and added rain effects so the screens looked as wet as the street around them.
To carry the campaign beyond the street, online and into the stores, I also designed in-store prints and decals, web banners, social media ads and newspaper ads. The web banners followed the same rule as the billboards: through programmatic buying, they only appeared on people's computers and phones when the sensor registered rain.
Results
The goal was to increase sales of Helly Hansen rainwear by 35%. In the participating stores, rainwear sales grew by 145%, more than four times the target, and reached Helly Hansen’s highest recorded sales in the category at the two chains.
