A Year of OS

The challenge

Touch Grass got Gen Z's attention. Keeping it was the harder job.

A campaign spike is easy to justify and easy to forget. OS needed a reason for the same people to open the app in February, in the rain, in the dark, not just on the one sunny weekend a creator posted about it.

The idea

Answer the excuse of the season.

Every month gives people a different reason not to go outside. Too cold, too dark, too wet, too early, too late in the year. So instead of shouting the same message twelve times, each season answered whichever excuse was actually in people's heads that month.

Five shoots across the year: the Purbecks in spring, Amberley in autumn, the New Forest in winter. I directed all of them and chose the locations.

Film

Spring: the clocks changed, so use the day. Three fifteen-second films on one idea: get up for the sunrise, watch the hours run through a single day, see how much fits in a weekend.

Autumn: argue the opposite. The autumn film opens by insisting autumn is terrible for hiking, lets people disagree in the comments, then dismantles its own argument by showing how good it actually looks. Bait the objection, then answer it.

Features told as stories. Community Alerts became a bloke standing waist-deep in a flooded path and a walker meeting a cow head-on, the feature demonstrated by the problem it solves rather than described. I made the 3D Maps film.

Photography and social

Each season got one image that carried it. I took them, organised the shoots and recced the locations. The layouts were another designer's, but I was in the room deciding how they looked.

One of the spring shots came back in winter as It's Cold, Be Bold. Everyone was already in fleeces, so it worked twice.

The winter carousels made the argument the campaign was built on, that the outdoors beats the gym. Treadmills became a group running through a forest. Bicep curls became lifting a rucksack.

The stickers were the bit I pushed for. Branded content gets scrolled past; a sticker is branded just enough that people use it themselves. I animated the winter set. Then I pushed them further. We were using them in frames, so I said we should print them, and they ended up on things.

Three of my photographs are on the OS Maps App Store page. The images people look at while deciding whether to download it.

Audio

Two thirty-second podcast ads on Acast. I wrote the Jay Foreman one, helped cast him, and did the edit and sound design on both.

The script is Jay Foreman shouting maps and apps at you, over and over, in a rhythm. That's the whole thing. Every deck said the same problem: everyone knows the maps, nobody knows there's an app. So rather than explain it, the ad welds the two words together until they stick. Audio is the right place for that. You can't scroll past a podcast ad.

Casting Jay Foreman helped, given he makes a comedy series about maps.

Get Real, Get OS Maps

The year ends with the brand moving on. I took the photography and came up with the concepts for the key visuals; another designer executed them.