The Guardian £1.3m pitch win for Seat campaign

OVERVIEW The Guardian needed to visualise their extensive business pitch concept to SEAT. The competition would be tough with us up against against 18 other media organisations, including a joint Facebook / Google venture and the winning pitch would be worth £1.3m.

BRIEF Working alongside the Creative Director of Guardian Labs, it would be my job to concept and mock up, all online and print elements and we had a month deadline.

CONCEPT Under the title ‘Feel Good Engineering’, our pitch would combine the passion and emotion of the culture of Barcelona combined with the perfection and technology of German engineering, and it would be delivered over two separate Guardian platforms.

EDITORIAL A series of in-depth investigations, bringing together the world’s foremost scientific and creative minds within six key themes (music, comedy, art, food, sport and fashion) and would be delivered in a series of incredible multimedia articles.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY This content turns the spotlight on how feel good engineering is at the heart of everything SEAT does and how it makes their cars the perfect driving experience. It was brought to life over a series of interactives, online and print articles and blogs. The series of 3 x interactives was the main selling point for the pitch and as the Guardian Labs has a mobile-first philosophy, then this interactive needed to work perfectly on all hand-held devices, so the design needed a huge thought process in planning and execution.

EXECUTION First in the interactive series would be ‘DESIGN’ and would visually tie together a conversation between one of the directors of SEAT with British design icon Paul Smith as they discussed the topic of ‘style’. Their conversation would be highlighted at certain trigger points on the timeline, with various videos, interactive games, music and images including the latest SEAT car wrapped in a Paul Smith striped skin. Over the next month, I created concepts for all editorial and BTYB content areas of the pitch including celebrity blogs for tablet, a series of in-depth investigations on mobile, online hubs and articles and various print elements.

OUTCOME We confidently sent out pitch entry in and were delighted to reach the final round. We firmed up our concept with more in-depth explanations of our content and I also designed a mock of the next interactive timeline which would be titled ‘Performance’. This did the trick and we were thrilled to find out we’d got over the finishing line. My designs had helped see off competition from really tough media competitors and it was The Guardian’s biggest pitch win to date. Or maybe it was the magic of David Bowie that did it...