Every brand has something the world has decided isn't cool. The job. The bus. The second-hand car. The store catalogue. The received wisdom says you work with what you've got and bury it in aspirational language. These campaigns didn't hide the uncool thing. They changed what uncool means. Here are seven creative reframe tactics that turned "a liability" into cultural capital.
- Treat It Like a Blockbuster
- Crash a Prestige Context
- Turn the Job Into a Drop
- Make the Catalogue the Content
- Give Everyone the Production Values
- Turn the Safety Gear Into the Fashion Show
- Remove the Label and Let the Product Win
1. Treat It Like a Blockbuster
Take the thing everyone ignores and produce it like the thing everyone watches.
Epic Bus — Midttrafik, Falkenberg, 2017
The brief: make people consider taking the bus in a market where public transport was seen as dull, inconvenient, and the choice of people with no other options. The reframe: produce a spoof Hollywood action trailer for the local bus service with a full cinematic treatment, luxury-product-launch energy, the kind of production register reserved for things people actually want. The bus didn't change. The frame around it did. By borrowing the codes of entertainment and spectacle, the campaign repositioned an uncool utility as something worth paying attention to.
“A dull truth will not be looked at. An exciting lie will. They must make their truth exciting and new.” Bill Bernbach
2. Crash a Prestige Context
Place the uncool product somewhere it has no right to be and let the surroundings do the reappraisal.
Museum of Romanticism — IKEA, McCann, 2017
The brief: challenge the assumption that IKEA meant functional and budget, not beautiful or timeless. The reframe: place IKEA furniture inside an 18th-century Romantic art museum, among genuine antiques, and challenge visitors to spot the IKEA furniture. When a stackable Billy bookcase sits next to a period chaise longue, and nobody notices, the argument is won without a single product claim. The museum did the persuading. IKEA just had to arrange the furniture. See campaign ->
3. Turn the Job Into a Drop
Reframe the uncool thing people avoid as the exclusive thing people want access to.
McDrip — McDonald's Finland, DDB, 2023
The brief: reverse a decline in Gen Z job applications at McDonald's, a brand that had lost cultural relevance with younger audiences. The reframe: partner with up-and-coming local fashion designer Jimi VAIN to create a limited fashion collection made from upcycled McDonald's uniforms — available exclusively to McDonald's employees. The logic was ruthlessly simple: want the drop, get the job. The uniform stopped being a mark of uncool employment and became an access code to something genuinely desirable. See campaign ->
4. Make the Catalogue the Content
Find the cultural format your audience already loves — and rebuild your uncool asset inside it.
Oddly IKEA — IKEA, Ogilvy, 2018
The brief: reach college students during back-to-school season and make the IKEA product range feel relevant to their lives. The reframe: rebuild the catalogue as a 25-minute ASMR video — tapping, touching, whispering — the YouTube format students were already turning to for stress relief. The products appeared naturally throughout, embedded in a format with genuine emotional utility. The campaign generated over 2.4 million views across platforms and drove a 27% uplift in Back To College sales. Nobody watched a catalogue. Everyone watched an ASMR video that happened to feature IKEA products. See campaign ->
