A deep dive into our government video production for the Office for Product Safety and Standards. Two campaigns asked to turn dense import legislation into something audiences would actually watch: a standout animation series in year one, and a quirky, tongue-in-cheek live-action follow-up in year two.
Meet Tess. The campaign hero from year two of our government video production work for the Office for Product Safety and Standards: a tongue-in-cheek, deliberately lo-fi live-action film built around an over-the-top 'importer' character. Year one's standout animation series landed so well that OPSS came back with a brief for something quirky and viral, and Tess is the result. A campaign built to land dense import legislation with the audiences OPSS's usual channels couldn't reach.
The Office for Product Safety and Standards is the UK's national regulator for consumer product safety and legal metrology, sitting inside the Department for Business and Trade. Their challenge was the kind every regulator faces but few crack: import legislation is heavy, dense, technical, and absolutely critical for the businesses bringing goods into the UK. OPSS needed to reach an audience that wouldn't normally engage with regulatory communications, and they needed to do it without watering down the substance. Twice. Year one had to be an animation campaign that didn't look like every other animation campaign. Year two, after the first landed, had to be quirky, viral, and built to engage.
Year one, we built a distinctive animation series with a visual language designed to break the mould of regulatory comms. Two films from that series, Overview to Importing and The Rules, sit in the carousel below. Year two, we went the opposite direction: a tongue-in-cheek live-action character called Tess, played at maximum over-the-top and shot deliberately lo-fi to feel native to the social feeds it would live on. Same audience, opposite tone, same strategic intent. Turn complicated rules into something people actually want to watch.
Both campaigns landed for OPSS. The year-one animation series clocked over 235,000 video views in its first 30 days and became a calling card for how a regulator can talk to the people it regulates without putting them to sleep. Year two went further still: a 300% increase in views and a 160% rise in click-throughs against the first campaign, with nearly one million views in just over a month. The work opened the door to new content formats inside the Department for Business and Trade, and proved that government video production can carry the energy of a brand campaign without losing the rigour the subject demands.
