The strategy

Imagination was an intrinsic part of the Bombay Sapphire brand story: the founder’s journey, the invention of new distilling processes through to the global search for botanicals. But this proposition had failed to land with consumers. The brand had talked imagination, but had not demonstrated it.

We sought a territory, a consumer passion, to engage with the target audience. Film was identified early as culturally democratic territory.

Short film felt ripe for reinvention: a previously niche cinema genre, new content-hungry online video channels created new opportunities to popularise the form.

The idea

To land the Imagination thought with a small opinion forming audience required very different behaviours to advertising. We needed a platform that could generate multiple connection points and reasons to believe.

This got us to a simple and powerful thought: an Oscar winning writer would write a short film script, stripped of any stage direction, to allow the readers to imagine their film off his script. The five most imaginative would go into production.

One script, five winning films. No film experience required, just imagination.

The Imagination Series was born. 5 winners were chosen by esteemed judging panel at Tribeca Film Festival and their film ideas promptly went into production, and eventually premiered at the following year’s Festival before being released online on Bombay Sapphire YouTube and Vimeo channels.