A Year of OS

The challenge

Touch Grass got Gen Z's attention, and keeping it was harder.

A big campaign moment is easy to forget. OS needed the same people opening the app on a dark, wet February evening, as well as on the one sunny weekend a creator posted about it.

The idea

Answer the excuse of the season.

Every month gives people a different reason not to go outside, whether it's too cold, too dark or too wet. So each season we picked the excuse people were most likely making and answered that one.

I did all of OS's shoots that year, in places like the Purbecks in spring, Amberley in autumn and the New Forest in winter. I directed and filmed them, edited the films, and picked every location.

Film

Spring was about using the extra daylight once the clocks went forward. We made three fifteen-second films on that: getting up for the sunrise, watching the hours go by in a single day, and seeing how much fits in a weekend.

For autumn we argued the opposite. The film opens by insisting autumn is terrible for hiking, lets people argue back in the comments, then shows how good it actually looks.

We showed the app's features through little stories. Community Alerts became a bloke standing waist-deep in a flooded path and a walker meeting a cow head-on, which is what the feature warns you about. I made the 3D Maps film.

Audio

There were two thirty-second podcast ads on Acast. I wrote the Jay Foreman one and helped cast him, directed both recordings, and did the edit, sound design and mix on both.

The script is Jay Foreman shouting maps and apps at you over and over, in a rhythm. Every deck said the same thing, that everyone knows OS for maps and hardly anyone knows there's an app. The ad just jams the two words together until they stick, which works on a podcast because you can't scroll past it.

Casting Jay Foreman helped, given he makes a comedy series about maps.

Photography and social

Each season got one image that carried it. I took them, organised the shoots, recced some of the locations and had a say in how the layouts looked.

One of the spring shots came back in winter as It's Cold, Be Bold. Everyone was already in fleeces, so it worked twice.

I took the photos and wrote the words for the winter carousels, which made the argument the campaign was built on, that the outdoors beats the gym. Treadmills became a group running through a forest, and bicep curls became lifting a rucksack.

The stickers were my idea. Real stickers in the videos felt more authentic than a digital call to action at the end. I animated the winter set, and once we were using them in frames I said we should print them, and they ended up on things.

Three of my photos are on the OS Maps App Store page, the ones people look at when they're deciding whether to download it.

And on the app's opening screen

Get Real, Get OS Maps

By the end of the year the strategy had shifted to Get Real, Get OS Maps. I took the photos and came up with the ideas for the key visuals.