Numatic International has launched its Tai Chi advertising and PR campaign, helping thousands sweep away negative energy with Numatic’s supreme-ultimate cleaning fist.
With help from the creative team at The Firehouse Group, Numatic is venturing into a new and exciting creative campaign that will differentiate themselves from competitors as an innovative and flexible cleaning equipment supplier. Thus, the idea of a Tai Chi creative campaign was born.
“Tai Chi finds a balance between energy, ability and vitality - and as leaders in our field, we need a campaign that showcases Numatic as an infinitely superior brand which promotes this balance. Through this new campaign, our company is endeavouring to restore some of the Ying and Yang harmony between humans and the earth,” says Dewald Botha, general manager for Numatic South Africa, one of the country’s leading cleaning equipment suppliers.
Botha believes there are many similarities between Tai Chi and Numatic’s approach to hygiene, health, vitality and protecting the environment. The link between the ancient art of Tai Chi and Numatic’s products is a substantial one, as products are developed to cultivate tranquillity and relaxation while reserving energy and increasing lifespan. A clean environment encourages relaxation, helps reduce stress levels and is calming in nature.
“As with anything aligned to a company’s reputation, developing a new campaign was a process. One needs to truly understand the company’s products and brand. However, we finally reached that Zen moment when we discovered the synergies between Tai Chi and Numatic,” says Sandy Greaves Campbell, CEO of The Firehouse.
The very campaign is based on people who use Numatic’s equipment rather than those who purchase it, according to The Firehouse Advertising’s creative director Rowan John. The focus and attention shifts away from the product to the hands of the user, giving it a degree of lateral thinking that makes the end user look like the expert as it showcases the level of effortlessness that person needs when operating the equipment.
“The casting was about finding real people that one would encounter in this environment rather than those in the fake-happy families adverts. These people also had dancing skills so that they could move effortlessly with grace and poise, which assisted in a slow motion performance by performers that would capture perfect shots for stills to be used in adverts,” adds John.
The Firehouse’s creative team used the option of manually shooting film to have the luxury of choosing the correct stop-frames and stills, giving them the opportunity to develop animated web banners that run at four frames per second that added value to the client’s spend. This, in turn, allowed The Firehouse to take a small budget and stretch it to achieve a unique and advanced creative campaign.
“Because the performers movements were in slow motion, the team could coach them to get the correct body language and perfect moves they wanted that would describe the art of Tai Chi cleaning,” explains John.
According to Botha: “This emphasises that through the moving meditation and vital energy that the Tai Chi campaign will provide, Numatic will move to a new level of harmony and balance, cultivating life force and energy through cleaning.”