Grouper: Smart spending

The core objective was to persuade the audience to spend more, despite being bombarded with a tremendous volume of messaging that advocated for saving. But what the heck – we relish a good challenge. It was definitely a time for saving, and no marketing strategy or communication could convince anyone otherwise. But there's always a loophole, and our job was to find it.

The reality was that we were in the midst of an obvious crisis. However, our generation was born in crisis, raised in it, and even took pride in that. Our attitude was, "Crisis who?" This embodied the typical Balkan stubborn spirit. Nonetheless, promoting financially irresponsible behavior was too extreme, so we sought a middle ground, a message that said, "Okay, we all need a break from all this saving and crisis," offering a solution.

Our compromise was this: yes, we need to save, but we don't have to cut corners on everything. The idea was to keep living life, even in times of crisis, and do so carefree because of Grouper, the masters of deal-finding. We understood that people were tired of everything, so we encouraged them to relax; we were there to help them save without skimping on themselves.

Thus, our slogan was born: "Save on everything, but not on yourself."

Now, we needed relevant examples to demonstrate how one can save intelligently without missing out on the things they love. In doing so, we had to consider the business processes of our client. The main categories generating the most traffic and revenue were travel, and beauty and relaxation.

Accordingly, we decided to set our scenarios within these contexts, developing two commercials – one focusing on travel and the other on beauty and relaxation. Both, however, shared the same slogan: "You can save on everything, but you don’t need to save on yourself because Grouper is here to save for you."

Once we had the scenarios conceptualized, we aligned the messaging with the client and refined them. There was a subtle difference between the two ads – the first depicted the positive implementation of the message by the protagonist, while the second illustrated the incorrect way to economize. However, we decided this discrepancy was not problematic, as the overarching message was very clear and provided the right context for both ads.

The shooting day was a lot of fun, which often is key to producing an excellent final product.