John Offenbach photographed the new campaign for Beazley, a specialist insurer based here in the States and with offices worldwide. The ads illustrate the need to protect important data and are based on real-life stories of companies that lost their clients’ personal data.
In one of them, people are walking in a park when suddenly papers come fluttering down from above—papers that turn out to contain patient data from a nearby hospital. In another, tapes fall out of the back of a delivery van, and in the third ad, hackers park a van behind an office building and tap into the company’s email and phone conversations.
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Photo by John Offenbach for Beazley.
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Rather than a detailed comp, the agency gave John drawings and invited him to bring them to life. “What was really fantastic was they came in a simplified form—just line drawings. So there was room to make it how we wanted,” says John, who shot the campaign in the Bronx (the hospital scenario), the Westchester town of Yorkville (the van), and Staten Island (the office).
“We started to work with John last summer. The brief was simple but challenging—evoke the unexpected (and often frankly bizarre) ways in which companies can lose large volumes of personal customer data, based on real-life examples,” explains William Pitt, head of marketing and communications for the Beazley Group. “John worked closely with our advertising consultant Mike Demos, and the results were stunning. The images are atmospheric, intriguing and beautiful, while being 100 percent on message.
“One of the first of the ads we ran, in Modern Healthcare, was reviewed by that magazine’s readers and deemed the most effective ad in that issue of the publication, significantly outperforming ads by far better known companies,” Pitt continues. “We look forward to working with John again in the future.”
“Not many artists are especially practical, and most practical types aren’t artists, but on our shoot John was both,” says Michael Demos. “And he is a really good guy, to boot. I definitely plan on working with him again.”
Special thanks to Scott Davis of Planet PrePro, who produced the shoot.
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Photo by John Offenbach for Beazley.
Photo by John Offenbach for Beazley.
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