Work of Art
The brief: create a brand campaign for a workforce management software company in the middle of the pandemic that had furloughed a large share of the workforce it manages.
When work actually works, it is genuinely beautiful. A work of art, even.
A hard category to humanize, right when humans were having the hardest time with it.
UKG builds AI-driven workforce management software that runs payroll, manages talent, and serves as the secret glue holding entire organizations together. Which, in 2021, was a hard job, given how many jobs were furloughed.
With emotions high, talking about the product didn’t make sense. But what if we talked about what work could be? What it looks like when work…works? So we wrote and produced films recreating famous paintings, using composition and lighting to recontextualize the modern work space as something most people wouldn’t expect: as a work of art itself.
Shot in Mexico City from the comfort of nowhere near Mexico City.
COVID restrictions meant the creative team could not travel. So the crew shot in Mexico City while the entire creative department directed over a video call. Certainly its own kind of challenge. But the results…
A beautiful film, print campaign, and a Fortune cover wrap. (Shout out and thanks to my old art history teacher, Mr. Knox.)
Credits
- Agency
- Zambezi, Los Angeles
- My role
- Senior Copywriter. Wrote and co-produced.
- Art Direction
- Tracey Chan
- Production
- Mexico City, under COVID restrictions, directed remotely