A marketing campaign for Seattle-based paper production company, Cloud Paper.
May – June 2021
7 Weeks
Miro
Figma
Illustrator
After Effects
Animate
School Project
Team Members
Theo Truong
Gregor Elgee
Trey Kingston
Graphic Designer
Copywriter
Art Director
Cloud Paper is an eco-friendly toilet paper company based in Seattle, WA. Made from sustainably harvested bamboo, Cloud Paper has helped save trees in old growth forests which are typically cut down to produce toilet paper. Cloud Paper also offers a subscription service for convenience and to reduce Co2 emissions normally created when shipping the products from warehouse to store.
For this project Cloud Paper looked to promote sustainable toilet paper and reached out to students at Seattle Central Creative Academy for ideas. The main goal for Cloud Paper was to develop a "no-potty mouth" marketing campaign that was serious about sustainability, not promoting toilet paper through potty jokes.
Develop a successful marketing campaign for Cloud Paper that aligns with their approach to sustainability and human empathy.
After researching Cloud Paper, we found that Cloud Paper values sustainability and environmentalism to help sell their products. The company had a previous campaign focusing on deforestation in major old growth forests around the world, and used fear of loss of these forests to market their sustainable products. While the campaign was effective, our team decided to take on a family friendly approach using animation to lighten the negatives when it comes to deforestation and pollution.
The Care About The Bear campaign was largely inspired by products with animal mascots such as the Charmin bears, Tony the Tiger, Smokey The Bear, and others. Our team's intention was to redirect people's focus an animal mascot to the species and the environmental implications that our daily habits can cause on the environment
The campaign consisted of 1 60-second promotional video, 1-30 second promotional video, 3 social media adds, 1 interactive web page, and 2 print assets.
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Our team got to meet for a little with Cloud Paper co-founder Ryan Fritsch gave us a little background on his company and his most recent marketing campaign Flush Co (seen right). Ryan explained Cloud Paper's values and approach to sustainability. We learned that Cloud Paper was an upcoming startup that encouraged people to think more sustainably about their toilet paper and paper product usage. Although the company at first only sold toilet paper products, they still chose to advocate for sustainability
Their 2020 marketing campaign "Flush" was a fake toilet paper company that let the buyer choose which old-growth forest they wanted their toilet paper from. This sparked a lot of contrevsy and shock, yet helped Cloud Paper make a name for themselves by revealing their idea behind the fake company. Due to this campaign's success, Ryan and his company have looked at other ways to advertise Cloud Paper.
After meeting with Ryan, our team, Marble Selective sat down and started ideating on Cloud Paper's goals with this campaign, and potential ideas we would do for each of the assets we would create.
Collaborating in Miro, we started with a 30-minute idea dump to come up with potential campaign ideas. The ideas were sorted into different categories: practical, sweet spot, impractical, and worst possible ideas. We chose to ideate this way as it is often a great way to bounce ideas around and combine ideas.
Once our team finished the exercise, we then chose our top 3 campaign ideas to begin more brainstorming. We looked at theme messaging, effectiveness, and audiences each campaign idea would target. Then, we began to sort out our campaign ideas for potential videos, social media, and print ads.
These 3 campaign ideas would then be pitched to the class before our team decides on a direction to go on. We focused mostly on campaigns that would encourage the audience to switch to Cloud Paper because of environmental factors. Our main campaign themes used were inspiring through facts, empathizing with others, and shock/fear.
We presented our 3 campaign ideas to the class, and got feedback for each. We listed our goals for Cloud Paper to see which campaign idea best aligned with our goals.
After receiving feedback from instructors and peers, our team decided to combine campaign ideas 2 and 3 to create the Care About The Bears campaign. The combined messaging of empathy and shock helped to create a campaign that was not entirely a dystopian future, but brought hope that things could be rebuilt. This messaging was more closely aligned with Cloud Paper's beliefs and goals.
The campaign would still feature animated bears as we still wanted the relationship of animated mascots selling products to be prevalent in our messaging. We also felt that the animated style would help reach kids as well as adults.
Knowing the audience was crucial in how we wanted to tell our Care About the Bear story. In planning, our goal was to have Cloud Paper reach a larger audience with happier more hopeful messaging.
Jayce is an active 8-year-old who loves to learn about plants and play soccer. He loves to play outside, even when it's rainy. Although Jayce is still young, he loves to speak his mind and grows very passionate about the new things he learns everyday. Currently, he loves to talk about mushrooms.
Likes: Mushrooms, Paw Patrol, fishing with his dad, the Seattle Sounders
At 33, Soren is a father of two and does everything he can to make his kids happy. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Soren is able to work from home and be a stay-at-home dad while his wife works full time as a nurse. Soren loves to spend time with his kids, and tries his best to regulate the type of media his kids consume. He is great at monitoring his kids' electronics time and loves to take them outside to play or learn more about their surroundings.
Likes: Star Wars, his Lego-filled basement, WIRED Magazine, Apple's parental controls, Disney+
Ryan is a first generation college student studying biology and environmental sciences at the University of Washington. Currently, Ryan rents a house in the U District with 5 of his friends who are all studying in sciences. Ryan and his roommates are all conscious of their ecological footprints and try to be wary of how much waste they produce. In his Junior year, Ryan consistently in the lab or studying, so he likes to try things that make his life a little more convenient.
Likes: TikTok, bouldering, this girl in his bio class named Jenny, anime, gaming with his roommates, and his mom's cooking
In Miro, we looked at various character styles to base our animated bears and assets off of. Theo, our main illustrator, created the base for all the bears and mapped them all out in different layers in illustrator for animation. Assets on the bears could be moved so that they could demonstrate different emotions, blink, and move their heads and arms.
When it came to developing the Cloud Paper promotional video, we started with specific messaging and callouts that we wanted the commercial to feature before writing the entirety of the script.
Our team looked at various facts on toilet paper, deforestation, and pollution before deciding on which facts to include in the final script. We had read over the script various times to make sure the final voiceover would fit in the 60-second and 30-second videos.
Big shoutout to instructor Jason Hoppe for doing the voice over for our animation!
Once we had the script down. we created a final storyboard to use as a guide for our animation. We matched the script with each frame and explained which scenes would take place over the voiceover and how it could relate.
Due to a time crunch, we had to make sure the animation was simple to not over complicate the story we wanted to tell with Cloud Paper.
A web page audit was done for various environmental websites. We analyzed the website's storytelling, placement of elements, and cohesiveness. For each website, we selected different assets we wanted to carry over to the Cloud Paper home page. This would be the company's homepage for the duration of the Care About the Bear Campaign.
After selecting the elements we wanted, we built out the first wireframe in Figma. Combing blank boxes and screenshots from the web page audit, we started to visualize what the website would look like. We also built a style guide to follow as we continued to flow in copy and photography.
For print materials, we focused on the main slogan for the Care About The Bear campaign because we wanted the messaging to come through as a quick and easy read. The slogan on its own was impactful and aligned with Cloud Paper's messaging to promote more sustainable habits by starting with toilet paper.
We worked on various iterations for the shirt layout before landing on a solid design for both front and back of the tote and T-shirt design.
Our team had the shirts screen-printed by a local vendor and wore them for a promotional photoshoot that was used for the social media videos.
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