In order to overcome the creative challenge of making office supplies seems fun, a fair amount of research was necessary to guide the ideation process and inspire the creative direction. The result of this challenge would be the creation of a framework that allowed the creative to produce depth at scale. More on this below.
The execution of the ideas conjured in the research phase would require a combination of product photography, compositing, retouching, and a reductive minimalist approach to make sure the content would be optically gripping, mentally stimulating, and visually rewarding.
For Office Depot OfficeMax the client wanted fun and engaging content. Lots of bright colors, lots to take in visually, with meaningful depth. The only issue was that their products were staplers, pens, and rolls of tape. How do we produce layered creative content from something as mundane as office supplies ‘at scale’ of several posts per week across multiple platforms. To be scaleable and reliably manifest multiple concepts would require a system for generating ideas - a foundational baseline to return to. Thus, my ‘conceptual disambiguation’ exercise was born - a simple exercise anyone can do to create a near limitless number of creative concepts.
In addition to layering meaning into the creative, sometimes the call for was something more topical. In this instance we would use a simplified version of the framework which would only combine the topic (such as a holiday or event) with office supplies that to create literal symbolism, making the takeaway as potent as possible. Other times it was about including specific narratives around certain products to function as a reminder to take action or invoke a specific mood.
Below, I've included some of the my favorite creative executions. Although, there were many more that came out of the disambiguation formula.
