The Cup [Spec Campaign, Part 1]
The Cup was a small, family owned coffeehouse I worked at a few years back. It’s a nice little place about two miles down the road from my house, right under the train station in Wantagh, NY. The genesis of this project came when I was puttering around town in my little green motorcar and happened to pass the ol’ girl. I started to think back to my days as a waiter there, serving coffee to yuppies and teenagers and all the drunk kids from the bar down the street, working ’til 3 in the morning, making five dollars an hour.
*sniffle* I’m getting all misty just thinking about the old days of manual labor.
No time for that though! Times change and I’m no longer a waiter anymore - I’m a copywriter now. And as an obsessive up-and-coming copywriter, I’ve begun subconsciously branding and re-branding everything I see in my daily life. It’s a gift and it’s a curse, but it’s a trait that leads to a constant flow of ideas. I began to wonder what kind of image would be effective marketing were they to expand into a chain. It hit me that the clientèle of the establishment - the yuppies, the drunk adults, and the hip teens - they all were visiting for the same reason. It was a fun, relaxed kind of place where you could just go to talk. A little less flashy than a Starbucks, but a little more like home.
My brainstorm on this project came together in this campaign you see here. I took the idea of “The Cup,” and transformed it into a motif for these three ads. Then I took three subjects which I considered were in direct opposition to the homey, fun atmosphere of the imagined chain. I also insisted my art director on this take a very basic, minimalist approach; I wanted the cups to do the speaking, not some fancy design. We came up with this layout together, and he designed a rather nice looking modern logo (a vast improvement over their current one).
Everyone who sees this project tends to giggle a little at the 2nd ad specifically. This makes me very happy.
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