Meta’s WhatsApp is taking a leadership stance in its end of year global campaign. The campaign, and the premise, are It’s Not the New Year Until You Get the Message You’ve Been Waiting For. Obviously, that message only counts if it’s on WhatsApp.
The campaign comes from BBDO San Francisco and Berlin and is built on the fact that midnight on New Year’s Eve is its busiest time for traffic. In 2020, 100 billion messages were sent on WhatsApp on New Year’s Eve, more than on any other day prior in the app’s 10 year history. 1.4 billion video and voice calls were placed, the most ever in a single day on WhatsApp. WhatsApp’s New Year stance is not a fantasy. It has taken over messaging. Even the Royal Family has a WhatsApp group and WhatsApp banking is commonplace in many countries. It now has more than 2 billion users and over 100 billion messages are exchanged on it daily.
The campaign commercial is on air in the US, the UK, Brazil, India and Germany. It was directed by Iconoclast’s Niclas Larsson and shot in Mexico with by Academy Award-winning cinematographer, Linus Sandgren.
Tres Colacion, global creative lead at BBDO, commented, “New Year’s Eve is one of the few global moments that really brings people together, so it was great to pair this with the universal insight that on a personal level the celebration doesn’t really happen until you hear from the people you know and love, and that more often than not those people can only reach you in that moment through WhatsApp. In each format, we set out to capture the essence of what it feels like to receive the message you’ve been waiting for. While the work takes us across the globe, the team worked tirelessly to craft a visual world where each of our protagonists is the main character of their own night.”
Credits:
Client: Whatsapp
Head Of Marketing: Eshan Ponnadurai
Director, Global Head Of Global Brand & Integrated Marketing: Vivian Odior
Creative Producers: Micah Gendron & Eric Rottenberg
Agency: BBDO San Francisco
Global Creative Lead: Tres Colacion
Global Strategy Lead: Jose Higuera
Global Senior Vice President, Group Account Director: Minjia Qiu
Global Account Supervisor: Virginia Cardozo
Agency: BBDO Berlin
Chief Creative Officer: Till Diestel
Creative Directors: Erick Barrios Hernández & Wolfgang Warzilek
Senior Art Director: Deepanjali Singh
Senior Copywriter: Florestan Roesemann
Designer: Arash Sabbagh
Managing Director: Mark Andree
Executive Producer: Alexander Geier
Production Company: Iconoclast Germany
Director: Niclas Larsson
Executive Producer: Swantje Rummel
Producer: Jacqui Wilkinson
Production Coordinators: Veronika Fuerthauer, Karin Rudokas & Sybella Stevens
Director Of Photography: Linus Sandgren
Gaffer: Ernesto Gil “Cubano”
Production Designer: Simone Grau
Art Director: Micaela Urrutia
Production & Location Manager: Carlos Ayami Erdmann @ Oriental Films
First Assistant Director: Alan Finlay
Local First Assistant Director: Adrian Gallardo
Editors: Nikolaus Kohler & Carla Luff
Offline Post Production: Iconoclast
Sound Designer: Wenke Kleine-Benne
Audio Post-Production: Mermaid Berlin
Motion Graphics Animation & Online Post-Production: Slaughterhaus Berlin
Post-Production Supervisor: Christian Wegehenkel
Music: Composed
Artist: Jacob Mülrad
Publisher: Universal Publishing Nordic
