Page 52 - Advertising Annual 55

WATSON DESIGN
OGROUP
BY SAM MCMILLAN
ne night while watching Charlie Rose, Watson Design information to find them. It’s fascinating, and for our clients, Group’s chief creative director, Fernando Ramirez, it’s a bit scary.”
found the key to his future. On the program, molecular biologist James Watson explained that while every other researcher was hitting a wall, he shifted his perspective. Ultimately, he and two other scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 for their work with DNA. They made big discoveries—including the structure of DNA— by looking at the problem in a different way. “That’s my design principle,” Ramirez says. And that’s why he named his website design company Watson Design Group (Watson/DG).
That ability to shift perspective while delivering insightful, cutting-edge websites to promote movies as disparate as Cloverfield and Cinderella has kept the Los Angeles–based Watson/DG in business for more than a decade. Technology changes, social media platforms come and go, and expecta- tions rise—and Watson/DG has become the go-to design studio for franchise-promoting websites. Lately, it seems, the nineteen-person-strong company has been on speed dial to promote tentpole movies, ranging from The Hunger Games franchise to Star Wars: The Force Awakens to the independent releases Amy, Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
“Early on, we were the viral guys,” Ramirez says. “Then we became the horror guys. Then the action guys.” With The Hunger Games franchise, Ramirez says, film studios “now see us as problem solvers. We get hired to elevate the brand— make it feel different, deliver a high-end design sensibility and a modern take on the franchise.”
Coming attractions
If you want a glimpse into the future of the web, the nearly two dozen folks at Watson/DG can provide a preview. “A few years ago, we worked on websites,” creative director Hleb Marholin says. “Now everyone is on social.”
Social content is where everything is going, Marholin predicts. “People don’t want to search for information. They want
Ramirez agrees. “There’s a lot of fear in the industry that websites will go away, and social and mobile will take over,” which only makes it harder for studios to find an audience through online marketing of their films. The way forward, Ramirez believes, is to accept social content as a way of searching and to understand that social media is about being part of a community and a conversation.
Keeping up with trends on social and mobile media is a never- ending challenge, according to vice president of production Jordan Cuddy-Angel. “Anything we do today is going to be uncool in three weeks. That’s just the nature of the medium. Facebook rolled out a native feature called Collages, Instagram lets you make carousels of images and Snapchat lets us post cool, timely stories that people find and put on their own feeds for their friends to discover.” To promote A24’s supernatural thriller The Witch, Watson/DG has been posting Snapchat stories about Donald Trump with the headline “Evil Takes Many Forms.” Timely, yes. In a month’s time, social and mobile users will have moved on. Watson/DG plans to move with it.
To help its clients thrive on social media, Watson/DG hired its own senior copywriter and strategist, Arin Delaney. Delaney says part of her role is to make sure Watson/DG stays savvy in the social space. “We pay attention to the psychology of sharing,” she says, “so we can create content that makes people look funny, cool or in the know.”
One of the coolest ideas ever was the Tinder stunt Watson/ DG launched to support the film Ex Machina, in which an artificial intelligence (AI) comes to life and asks, “Do you think I’m real?” To drive interaction around the film’s premiere at South by Southwest (SxSW), Watson/DG created its own AI. Using a headshot of Alicia Vikander, who plays the AI Ava, Watson/DG posted a Tinder profile of
Watson Design Group supplied the captions and served as the digital agency on all projects shown.
Right: “For Cinderella, our goal was to create a digital campaign that would appeal to a whole new generation of girls. With a focus on courage, kindness and magic, we developed an interactive storybook known as Cinderella Past Midnight (cinderellapastmidnight.tumblr.com), a destination site built on Tumblr. Supporting social content played up the film’s premium look—lush, elegant and timeless.” Walt Disney Studios, client.
52 Illustration Annual 2016