Campaign Trail is our analysis of some of the best new creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
Picture an ad about health and fitness and you’ll probably imagine footage of young athletes — perhaps celebrity ones — beads of sweat as a shortcut for exertion and motion standing in for performance. No matter how much kinder, gentler and more relatable, advertising around fitness thrives on these stereotypical portrayals of health.
With its latest brand campaign, health tech company Oura seeks to change all that. “Give Us the Finger” shares a vision of health and fitness that embraces the aspirational side of aging instead of the anxiety over it.
“Gen Z and millennials … are anxious about aging,” said Oura CMO Doug Sweeny. “Our perspective is that longevity is not just about the length of your life, it’s about how well you are living your life, how healthy and happy you are at all stages of your life.”
Those stages are on display in a 60-second spot at the heart of “Give Us the Finger.” Directed by Walid Labri of production company Love Song, the spot follows a diverse cast of individuals, ranging in age from their 40s to late 70s, and moves from Oura Ring to Oura Ring in gyms, diners, art galleries, bedrooms, the outdoors and more.
The campaign includes linear TV, out-of-home ads in major cities and a New York City experiential activation and was created with independent creative agency Nice&Frank from an especially straightforward brief from Oura.
“A lot of times you don’t get really clear briefs, or sometimes the brief wants to try to do too much, but our team worked with them to come with a crystal clear brief that was really unique,” explained Nice&Frank Creative Director Rob Stone. “The idea of longevity was there from the start. The idea that we’re selling is you can get old, and Oura can help you get there.”
Helping the creative process along was Matt Kipper, the head of creative at Oura, who came up with the headline “Live Fast, Die Old” and had even comped up a billboard.
“We immediately got a flavor for what they were looking for,” added fellow Nice&Frank Creative Director Pat Newman. “Our tastes lined up perfectly.”
Vignettes without clichés
The clarity of the brief provided a throughline for the creative: from telling people to embrace aging, to keying in on the finger on which they wear the Oura Ring, to the double entendre of “Give Us the Finger.” From there, Nice&Frank wrote about 80 to 100 vignettes before whittling down to the nine in the final spot by focusing on the middle ground of visually interesting and relatively grounded.
“It was a tough process to get to the best one,” Stone said. “It’s an instinct thing. Sometimes you’re pushing it a little too far and it starts to feel a little too forced. You don’t want to show a skateboarding grandma.”
To cast the spot, the agency landed on another simple touchstone: show the coolest old people — a rarity in an industry that is seemingly obsessed with engaging millennial and Gen Z consumers by making them feel represented in ads. That led the team to cast viral street baller George Papoutsis and world-renowned Argentine tango dancers Mónica Romero and Omar Ocampo (even older: Leonardo da Vinci’s 500-year-old “Saint John the Baptist,” shown in the ad with an Oura Ring).
“It was [about] casting real people that looked like they had lived a super-long, vivacious life. It’s almost like, show don’t tell,” Stone said. “We’ll show the best version of what getting old looks like.”
Oura’s Matt Kipper came up with a “Live fast, die old” tagline.
Courtesy of Oura
From there, Nice&Frank set out to create a vignette spot that didn’t feel like similar ads. Director Labri came up with the ad’s look and feel, which is a constant push-in that cuts straight between scenes.
“It’s almost like this tunnel-like effect where you’re traveling through each vignette and it just continues through one interesting world into another,” Newman said of a shooting style that was not without its own issues. “Because you’re basically just pushing in, everything’s going to be choreographed, and you somehow have to navigate through the entire environment and end up on their finger at the end of each shot.”
The spot ends on a park bench ad emblazoned with “Give Us the Finger,” a provocative tagline that is more about flocking together with birds of a feather than flipping the bird.
“It just felt right. We did know we were pushing the boundaries here a bit,” said CMO Sweeny. “We also thought it was an invitation, which we thought was interesting too… It could be a way of signaling that you’re part of something, which we thought was really powerful.”
