Oppikoppi Odyssey: The brief

Team work

 

Searle explained to us how AAA got hold of the brief: "Each year third year and postgrad AAA students are required to take part in the final year and final brief which is called Brandfile. Here either companies / brands approach us or AAA approaches them. We are asked to create a full through-the-line campaign to almost 'overhaul' the brand. However in this case, Oppikoppi creates a new theme for each year, so our obligation was to create a new theme for Oppikoppi 2014." 

 

 

The group put to task consisted of art directors, graphic designers, copywriters, and an account and brand management marketing team: Claire Searle, Andrej von Walter, Justin Williams, Peta Malan, Stephanie Jesson, Mikhail Gany, Liam Kelly, Cleo Venter, Anastaisia Cressy, Jamaine Chiwaye, and Nina Kenyon.

 

This being Oppikoppi's 20-year anniversary, the team had a lot of "good pressure" on it to produce the goods.

 

"I think we definitely felt that pressure, but we put it to good use. After being briefed by Carel (Carel Hoffmann, co-founder of the festival), we gained a lot of great insight as to what the festival is about. As we have dealt with so many other briefs, we knew what had to be done, but with this brief the pressure was a lot more as it contributed a large portion of our final marks and it ran over six weeks instead of the normal two weeks that were given to normal briefs," explains Searle. 

 

Powerful name

 

The theme is very intriguing being very abstract at this point in time. It seems like a combination of Homer's Odyssey meets Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey / Star Trek: Odyssey, but we were quite off the mark with its origins - according to Searle, the name came about by pure luck!

 

"We started off by brainstorming different names. We thought by coming up with a powerful name, the rest would fall into place, and luckily it did. Oppikoppi Odyssey was pure luck as on one day of brainstorming, Liam brought a book called Odyssey - this was a photography book about travels and funnily enough not about Homer’s story. We all loved the name, but we actually changed it to 'Odyssee' instead of the correct spelling. We felt that by having the 'see' in it, we wanted consumers to experience their Oppikoppi journey on all levels and senses. We only learnt after we chose the name that it was the name of Homer’s book of a 20-year epic journey of Odysseus. So like I said, we found a name and the greatness fell into place," says Searle. 

 

 

The imagery for Oppikoppi Odyssey was done by visual artist Louis Minnaar, an artist who's well involved in the South African music scene being one third of the Bittereinder trio.

 

About the journey

 

"The look and feel came from the augmented reality segment of our campaign; we didn’t want it to be too 'spacey' but something of a journey of self-discovery, this journey being your journey to Oppikoppi. We thought when you go to a music festival, the journey before the festival is a large contributor to your journey. As Oppikoppi has over 20,000 festival goers, these are people from all over the country and the world, and we felt it would be awesome if you could follow and experience the journey of your fellow festival-goers," says Searle. 

 

 

After six-weeks of hard work, and pulling regular sleepless all-nighters, the AAA team have indeed produced the goods, and the journey all comes to a head in two weeks as Oppikoppi 20 kicks up a dust storm in Northam, Limpopo.  

 

For more info, go to www.oppikoppi.co.za.

 

Top story image credit: Original photo by Mike Schmucker; design by Jean Lombard