“It’s always such an amazing pleasure and opportunity to work with Thornberg & Forester – it’s a true partnership in every sense of the word. We recently worked with them on a national product launch for Xumo Stream Box and Spectrum One Stream; from ideation through execution, they were collaborative and receptive to feedback. Throughout the process we threw many pivots their way, and they continuously responded with grace and patience like the true professionals they are. They are such a talented group and always bring their A-Game. Their design and attention to detail are next level and the outcome is always creative of the highest caliber. I’m looking forward to many future projects together.”
– Kelly Linskey, Director, Marketing & Creative Strategy
Xumo is a joint venture of Charter Communications and Comcast that operates free ad-supported streaming television and advertising video on demand. The service distributes Xumo Stream Box digital media players and Xumo Smart TVs.
Our friends at Spectrum engaged us to craft a national campaign to launch this new, awesome service. The ask was to leverage the tenets of each brand, and to design a robust system of elements that would be seen and heard by millions of people across the country.
Deliverables included a variety of broadcast spots, nationwide print and digital OOH, creation of photoreal 3D assets for key art, headquarters graphics, and B2B and B2C sizzle reels. The OOH campaign alone consists of thousands of units, set in both English and Spanish. High impact installations include NYC tour bus wraps, Madison Square Garden, a massive wallscape in Dallas, The Reef in Los Angeles, L.A. Live, and even boat installations in Tampa!
Thornberg & Forester designed the master brand refresh for Spectrum and Spectrum Mobile over the course of the 2019 calendar year. Since then we’ve continued to leverage and evolve brand attributes to coexist with brands: Apple, Samsung, and most recently, Xumo.
The spot above is the hero :30 we designed and produced for the Spectrum One Stream and Xumo launch campaign. Our friends at Spectrum furnished our team with scripts, we did a deep dive into the brand attributes of Xumo, and responded with a handsome design system that was built to showcase the Xumo hardware and UI and to clearly present the many offers from Spectrum. In addition to a host of English and Spanish HD :30s, we also crafted a handful of :15 cutdowns, including 4×5 and 9×16 formats for social.
For OOH, our primary task was to design a system of print and digital ads that would feature the beautiful simplicity of the Spectrum One Stream and Xumo service, at a glance. It was paramount for the ads to feel like an extension of the broadcast spots. This work was done in tandem with the creative of the on-air spots.
The footprint for OOH spans coast to coast with thousands of high impact locations from Los Angeles to New York City. Each location also required a variety of high resolution print mechanicals and digital comps of varying shapes and sizes.
Check out all the locations for both print and digital, English and Spanish across the U.S.:
The hero features of the ads are six, 3D devices, the Xumo UI, and the Xumo brand swirl. When auditing the supplied 3D models of the router, Xumo box and remote, we found at closer glance, the models and textures were not crafted for high resolution print material. The models worked for broadcast, but for high resolution print applications, the geometry of the models had to be refined to increase image quality and fidelity. In addition to refining the models and making them absolutely pristine at massive scale and resolution, our team also recreated all button icons and numerals for the remote. Check out a few details of our 3D work below:
A huge array of varied specs, resolutions, and guidelines were gathered by our team from several media vendors. From there, our producers generated a robust and highly-detailed matrix of deliverables that would include several master layouts. These master layouts would then aid in populating other areas of our matrix that called for identical specs.
There were many special one-off cases, such as the massive Dallas wallscape seen below. This artwork is comprised of four huge sheets of printed vinyl. Each strip is over 107 ft long and 53 ft wide. We heard their combined weight for transport was over 2,500 pounds! In addition to building our mechanicals to ensure bleed from one panel to the next would yield perfect, seamless results, text for all creative on this particular wall is limited to 20% of the overall creative area (this includes disclaimer text and even the UI text on the screens of our devices).
L.A. Live is an entertainment complex in the South Park District of Downtown los Angeles. It’s sprawling size of 5.6 million square feet is populated with several digital displays of varied shapes and sizes for advertsing, many of which can accommodate animation. The displays in the main plaza (Microsoft Square) can accommodate sound as well.
While the campaign was designed to be static, we wanted to add a little life to the units that support animation and sound. TRT time for the ads are :15, so we lifted a driving section of the track we used for the Spectrum One Stream/Xumo broadcast spots, and cued sweeping light through the Xumo swirl.
Another very cool area of L.A. Live is the trio of displays that flank the Ritz Carlton and Marriott hotels. Though there are no speakers for these displays, sound from the plaza can be heard here. The sweeping light moves from screen one, through two, and then through three to unite them all.
Stay tuned for further documented examples from L.A. Live!
Thank you to our friends at Spectrum for selecting T&F as your creative ally for such an important campaign, and for your trust and confidence in us to conceive and turn around such a massive scope of work in such limited time.
Special thanks to our friends at Billups for another amazing experience in working together and to Outfront Media and Vector Media for working extraordinarily close with us to ensure colors, bleeds, and overall quality was on brand and absolute top-notch before going to press.
And of course, thank you to the T&F team for your infallible dedication to continuing to make work of this level, happen.
