How EE decided to make some noise

EE recently launched a new, nationwide campaign in which the brand focuses on three areas; home, learning and work, and gaming.

Each of the three films was created by Saatchi & Saatchi and produced through Art Practice, and use music as the driving force. Faithless's 90s banger Insomnia, It’s Not Over Yet by The Klaxons, and Bloc Party's So We Are Here provide a powerful and recognisable backdrop to define the campaign's tone and personality, as well as helping to convey the narrative.

Below, Will John, ECD at Saatchi & Saatchi, and Kelly Engstrom, Brand & Demand Generation Communications Director at EE, talk about why they wanted music at the heart of the campaign, how they chose the tracks they did, and why more ads should be like music videos.

Above: Faithless's 90s classic Insomnia was the soundtrack for EE's spot, directed by Daniel Wolfe, about children's bedtime.

At what point in the conversation was music, and the tracks you might use, brought up? 

WJ: From the very off. The power of music is undeniable. We wanted to use it to embody EE’s new direction, to help define it and set its tone and personality. To do that we baked it into our ideas from the start - not as an afterthought, but as a way to help drive each storyline and elevate all the emotion in the films. Without a VO or dialogue, we needed songs that could help highlight the narrative arc we were communicating. 

KE: For a long time, Kevin Bacon has featured in our adverts and, whilst he still does, he now has a different role in our new EE adverts. As part of our ambition to be the UK’s most personal, customer-focused brand, our new brand campaigns feature real people, in real homes and real communities.

We wanted to use music to help make our adverts even more relevant and connect with consumers. 

This new approach meant that we knew we needed to have new branding cues that felt relevant to the nation and so, quite quickly, the music became that. When you hear a track, it takes you back to a moment in your life, and so we wanted to use music to help make our adverts even more relevant and connect with consumers. 

For me, the strength of the track choices is that not only does it deliver on the strategy to be relevant and drive connection with customers, but it has also become a branding cue for us really quickly.

Above: Kelly Engstrom, Brand & Demand Generation Communications Director at EE, and Will John, ECD at Saatchi & Saatchi.

This is a new direction for EE; why was music an important part of the new strategy?

WJ: We were super-conscious that we were creating a new EE, a modern British brand, so we wanted British tracks to reflect the brand's British heritage. And, going back to setting the brands tone and personality, EE is showing up as a more personal and relevant brand in peoples lives than before, so we needed tracks that mirrored that. 

We wanted British tracks to reflect the brand's British heritage. 

Plus, the kind of tracks that gets people to turn the ads up instead of turning them off. And it worked, with all the songs making it back into Shazam’s top 10. 

KE: New EE has an ambition to be the most personal, customer-focused brand and so, throughout our brand campaigns, we want to tell stories that are insightful and driven around our customers lives. An added dimension to that is using tracks that bring back memories from people's lives. 

When we talk about putting kids to bed, a lot of these parents were out raving to Insomnia when they were younger and so, not only does Insomnia help to tell the story about not getting any sleep, but it resonates with parents too. We were consistent when choosing the music for our new brand campaigns and so as I say, this has quickly become a branding cue for us.

Above: It’s Not Over Yet, by The Klaxons, was the soundtrack for EE's spot about home video gaming, directed by Daniel Wolfe.

Can you tell us why each track was chosen for each film and what it brought to the creative idea?  

WJ: Each film celebrates a moment in peoples lives. The battle of bedtime - getting your kids off their tech and into their beds to sleep. The moment kids are unleashed from school - away from teachers and parents, getting up to all sorts. They’re universal moments that we’ve all experienced in some way or another. We wanted tracks that reflected it all. So with bedtime and tech keeping your kids up, we could have gone for a more obvious sleep track like Golden Slumbers by the Beatles, but that’s not true to the chaos of how bedtime really is. The kids go mental, they peak before they crash, and Insomnia was the perfect way to capture that hyped up rampage. 

We could have gone for a more obvious sleep track like Golden Slumbers by the Beatles, but that’s not true to the chaos of how bedtime really is.

The music also drove the aesthetic of each spot. We wanted each film to have its own visual language. They all still need to hang together as a body of work, obviously, but the camera language and effects are inspired by the track and moment. Take Insomnia, that old school anthem; we wanted to take the aesthetic of old rave videos and transfer them to a modern everyday moment, like getting your kids to sleep... and it works so well.  

KE: The music chosen needed to evoke a memory and help to tell a story, as Insomnia did in our Britain’s Sleeping film. In the same way, our new advert to launch EE Game featured It’s Not Over Yet by the Klaxons. This was chosen not only to showcase how it’s never really over when you’re gaming but, also, as it is a cultural track that will resonate with people of all ages, from young gamers to parents of gamers. Throughout all of our new adverts we have used tracks to appeal to different audiences, and tracks that will evoke emotions and memories.

Above: Images from EE's new three-spot campaign.

How did you know when you'd found the right track and how much debate was there around what to use? 

WJ: Some spots had the music nailed on from the very start when writing and presenting scripts, but others changed with the shoot, like Freedom for example. We changed the track once we got into the edit and saw all of that beautiful, intimate footage. We needed a song that better captured that spirit. We actually started out wanting to use M-Beat & General Levy’s Incredible, which would have given that film a totally different feel! 

Some spots had the music nailed on from the very start when writing and presenting scripts, but others changed with the shoot.

KE: We wanted our new brand campaigns to tell stories that really resonated with people, and the track had to help do that. It had to make people feel like EE is a brand that gets me, and it also had to help the advert stand out. We wanted to choose music that you don’t expect to see in an advert and that are well-loved British tracks.

Above: So We Are Here, by Bloc Party, provides the soundtrack to the third of the three-spot campaign, directed by Elliot Power.

The three spots are arguably like mini-music videos; was that always an aim?

WJ: Absolutely. Music videos are usually tight constructs; visually powerful, captivating, insightful and entertaining. Why not make the ads like that? We wanted to take personal and relevant human experiences and give them a music video aesthetic. Not slice-of-life, mundane hum-drum, but everyday life; elevated, ramped up, driven on by great scores, the big British bangers of Faithless and Bloc Party that, collectively, are a bit like a mixtape of modern Britain.

Music videos are usually tight constructs; visually powerful, captivating, insightful and entertaining. Why not make the ads like that?

KE: From the start we talked about how we wanted the adverts to feel like music videos of people's lives, using tracks that are the soundtracks to their lives and that they instantly recognise. EE has always been a brand that is innovative, and we wanted that for new EE, especially with our advertising. Our previous adverts have always stood out, and so we wanted these spots to also feel different and exciting, and to connect with people in a way that music videos do.