Lebara goes deadpan in new campaign

Barbara is happy. Thank you, Lebara. Variations of this line are heard across three new films for Lebara, created in close collaboration between By The Fire and director Olli Rönkä from Plotworks. 

In the films, we meet the couple Torben and Barbara, who find themselves in different situations after switching to Afford More.

“There are many ways to talk about price,” says Cris Hödar-Rasmussen, Creative Director at By The Fire. “For Lebara, it made sense to take an understated approach - especially since the entire brand premise is about simplicity and avoiding unnecessary fuss.”

The deadpan approach is central to the campaign. “Deadpan is a way of simplifying a story and creating a dry, confident humour that really comes into its own when fully executed. Olli is a true master of this and has refined this style again and again,” says Tim Resdal, Executive Producer at Plotworks, continuing: “There are a lot of films out there. Every ad break is loud, and there are plenty of those too. From the beginning, the brief was clear: these films should stand out by being stylistically confident all the way through. A kind of ‘loud silence’ that, in a way, underlines the concept itself.”

Rönkä adds: “It’s been fantastic working with a client that gave us so much creative freedom. They really listened to our recommendations, engaged in the creative discussions, and showed a level of trust I rarely experience. It allowed us to work with tonality and detail to a much higher degree, both in what we planned from the start, and in the things that emerged on the shooting days. Take, for example, Torben’s beard, which the idea for the style came about on the day when we saw the full outfit together on the set. Or the decision to include a huge chandelier in the frame, which, in vertical formats like 9:16, takes up quite a bit of space but adds significantly to the film’s visual universe.”

In the films, we see Torben and Barbara living out their dreams with the money they’ve saved on a simple Lebara subscription. It’s not sports cars, gold watches, or villas in the south of France, but the small things that make everyday life a little sweeter.

According to Hödar-Rasmussen, the concept originally leaned toward longer formats: “On script level, it actually started as longer formats. But in collaboration with Olli, it became clear that the emotions came through more strongly in shorter versions with simple execution. That’s why it made sense to let the 15-second films stand as one-takes with a locked-off camera,” says Cris.

“Often, you worry about whether you’re telling enough, but here it felt completely natural for the campaign universe,” adds Resdal. “We keep going back and forth on which versions are strongest. In a way, there’s something very satisfying about the 15-second films that they’re so straight forward. But it’s a matter of taste,” he concludes.