Placing a modern problem in the past might sound like a gimmick. It isn't. When you transplant a contemporary behaviour, excuse, or injustice into a historical setting, you strip away all the rationalisations audiences use to defend it. History becomes a mirror, not wallpaper. Here are five tactics from the Storytelling Engine that send modern problems back in time to make them entertaining and memorable.
- Transplant the excuse into a historical mirror
- Use a famous past event to prove the product's stakes
- Reimagine history to prove the product's value
- Draw the historical parallel to indict the present
- Expose the current absurdity by contrasting it with the past
1. Transplant the excuse into a historical mirror
The period setting doesn't change the behaviour — it just removes every defence the audience had for it.
Helmet Is Always a Good Idea — Danish Road Safety Council, & Co Copenhagen, 2021
Around 45% of Copenhagen's cycling casualties weren't wearing a helmet, and consumer research kept surfacing the same excuses: too itchy, ruins the hair, I never fall off. Rather than refute them, the Danish Road Safety Council transported them wholesale to 893 AD. The film opens in a Viking village on the eve of a raid, where warrior Svend announces to his army that he won't be wearing his helmet — because it's itchy, wrecks his hair, and he's a careful rider. The strategy landed because Denmark wears Viking helmets with national pride at international sporting events; seeing the same excuses delivered by the group most historically associated with wearing helmets made modern cyclists look not just vain, but absurd. Campaign liking hit 87%, organic reach reached 84%, and one in three non-users seriously considered buying a helmet after seeing the film.
KitKat Password (Wunderman Thompson, 2023) used the same logic for a different brief — a knight at a medieval drawbridge struggles to remember his password to enter the castle, takes a break, and remembers it. The modern frustration transplanted into period setting made the case for KitKat's 85-year-old brand truth without needing to update a word of it. Heineken Silver's Viking Saga (BBH USA, 2023) used the same setting for a different purpose entirely — a Viking love story without a bitter ending became a metaphor for a beer without a bitter taste. Same era, different strategic function: product demo rather than behavioural mirror.
2. Use a famous past event to prove the product's stakes
Find the moment in history where your product truth would have mattered most.
Made For Peace — Simba, BBH London, 2019
To stand out in a category dominated by product messaging, Simba needed a brand platform with genuine cultural scale. BBH found it in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The 60-second film opens on the deck of an aircraft carrier in 1962, where an American general and a Russian general face each other — and rather than erupting into conflict, share a friendly game of tennis. The campaign's argument is simple: better sleep leads to calmer decisions, and calmer decisions change outcomes. The film closes by returning to the present day, making the point that the world needs that logic now as much as then. Launched to coincide with the UN International Day of Peace, with £10 from every Simba Hybrid Mattress sold that week donated to Peace One Day, the campaign elevated a functional product truth — sleep affects decision-making — into something that felt historically and politically resonant.
Mattress Firm's We've Got a Problem, America (Droga5, 2021) took the same product category in the opposite direction — coining the term "junk sleep" and using surreal present-day scenarios to dramatise its consequences. No historical setting, but the same underlying logic: escalate the stakes of a low-interest category until the audience takes it seriously.
3. Reimagine history to prove the product's value
Put a historical figure or story in a world without your product and let the audience feel the gap. Absence is the argument
Prime Changes Everything — Amazon Prime, Joint, 2021
Rather than listing Prime's benefits as features, this campaign visualised the gap between what historical figures needed and what they had. The execution imagines Rapunzel summoning a ladder via same-day delivery, Medusa checking out sunglasses, fairy-tale characters whose outcomes would have been transformed by a Prime membership. The old world setting here is used to dramatise absence. You feel the value of the product precisely because the character doesn't have it yet, and you can see exactly what it would have changed. The further back the counterfactual, the more obvious the modern product's value becomes.
HSBC Fairer Tales (That Lot, 2023) rewrote classic stories so characters solved problems through financial resilience rather than luck or rescue — turning familiar fairy-tale logic into a product demo distributed to over 900 schools.
