In 2018 we produced a follow up to the popular Omer the Admissions Guy videos. These videos both launched our career and established King’s Academy’s international image.
By many accounts they were a creative home run. In the years since I can’t even count how many students and faculty members have cited those videos as one of the main elements that drew them to King’s in the first place.
No doubt, the videos were widely watched, especially in our own region.
Last year we came across a multimillion dollar Saudi Arabian tourism campaign with millions of views and thousands of enthusiastic comments lauding its brilliance and originality. Something struck us. The video had some uncanny similarities to our 2018 piece “It’s Not a Competition”.
The rhythm and pacing, the tone of voice, the turns of phrase, the camera movement. The similarities were not 1:1, but there was something happening here.
Am I the only one to see the resemblance? The benefit of the doubt I can offer is that this work is warmly inspired by our work. If anything it’s a big compliment. A huge tourism campaign considered our work good enough to use as a model.
It’s not the first time we’ve found work that closely resembled our own. I take it as encouragement at the end of the day. If we are being followed, that means we must be leading the way.
We take great pride in being one of the few companies still standing who produce original, creative, human-made work.
Though masquerading as a film production company, really we are a full spectrum brand identity agency with a grassroots approach to storytelling. Rather than getting locked up in creativity-numbing process of too many cooks, we keep a small team who endeavours to tell sincere stories by getting to know the communities we are representing.
I am curious what it would be like if countries started calling us to express their story to the market. I’m curious how we would transfer our immersive process with schools to that stage.
I know that many of the principles will remain in tact: humor, sincerity, informativeness, delight and the fact that our work must be a gift to the viewer. If someone is to give us their time we must give them a worthwhile experience.
At the end of the day clients call us for our ability to take ownership of representation. They call us for our tact and our care for our work.
While others will continue building their work on the shoulders of that which already exists, you will find us at the front line of creativity, boldly charging forward into the unknown with our experience, our ability and our intuition lighting the path.
Do you see the similarity in the work? Here’s a side by side so you can form your own opinion.
If you’re in the market for CI - Creative Intelligence, you’ve come to the right address.
