After months of restrictions on movement and on life in general, Aruba wanted to get back out on the road and reconnect with their internal sales teams, customers and channel partners in a COVID secure manner.

Aruba’s EMEA Vice President and Sales lead, Morten Illum was keen to spearhead the new initiative. bbd were brought on board to create the branding, merchandise and social support for the tour.

For the branding, the team took the position that after the previous 18 months, the journey itself was the most important focus for the campaign with the freedom to travel. We included a collection of places, people, moments and memories taking visual cues from the world of music festivals and live gigs. 

A bright playful visual style leverages the Aruba colour palette heavily, but brings a sense of freedom and expression by incorporating simple, bold infographic shapes and graphical flags. By changing the Aruba brand colours to be ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ our visuals can change to reflect the winter and summer seasons.

The look and feel was taken on to the van itself with metallic stickers created for easy decoration of the van on location – especially when for the first leg the van needed to be a rented one.

The tour was slated to start in January 2021, therefore using the colder winter colour palette to take in the 3 key Scandinavian markets (Denmark, Sweden and Norway). Unfortunately COVID restrictions tightened just before the tour began and continued for a number of months. This meant the tour eventually ran in May & June of 2021 and took in locations across Denmark and Sweden over the course of a few weeks.

In preparation for the tour and in keeping with the music festival theme, bbd created a line of merchandise that could be given out to those Morten met on Tour, as well as potentially being used for competitions on future tours.

COVID restrictions meant that there was no possibility of anyone accompanying Morten on tour to capture social content on the tour. This made the whole campaign slightly more challenging, but we rose to it through producing a guide for creating social content as well as creating a content calendar skeleton that could be pre-populated with some prepared content that gives a feel of the tour with the key Aruba talking points whilst giving a structure for improvisation based on what happens.

bbd gave training to Morten and a list of suggested equipment that could help with the creation of content as well as some test content creation exercises so that we could perfect not only the content being created, but also the approval process.

The tour was Aruba branded however it was important to demonstrate a more playful tone than the usual Aruba campaigns to help reflect Morten’s personality as well as the brand values and key talking points of Aruba. To help bring this to life, bbd created a series of GIFs which we used to augment the story posts created for the campaign.

The campaign was a test campaign with no paid promotion behind the posts. The Instagram channel was seen more as a place of content creation which could then feed the internal & external newsletters as well as Morten’s Linkedin presence. We certainly created a lot of content for the channel, as well as helping to extend the reach of the campaign and generate engagement with the content.

Morten Illum said “I really appreciate everything you do. Cheers to all the Aruba on Tour support team. I love you in a professional way!”

The format is now being rolled out into a second phase of the tour in Germany and the hope is to build on the initial momentum from the Scandinavian leg, keep evolving the content, creative look and feel of the campaign which is now moving into the summer palette.