th1ng has directed and animated a new online ad campaign created by Leo Burnett Business for The Options Industry Council (OIC) in the United States. OIC is an unbiased resource that exists to help educate investors in the proper use of options to meet their financial goals.

 

The campaign brings to life the simple idea – there is an options strategy for every market condition. The idea is captured in the line, “It’s amazing what you can do with Options”.

 

There are four animated sequences in the campaign, each 15 seconds long, all hand-drawn by award-winning illustrator Will Barras at th1ng.

 

A specially created character interacts with the two seemingly unrelated banners as he picks a letter from the word ‘OPTIONS’ and uses it to overcome a challenge. So, the letter ‘P’ transforms into a key that opens a door to new investment ideas, while ‘I’ is transformed into an umbrella that the man unfurls as a shield against financial storms. He bends an ‘N’ into a pole vault to use for leverage, and in the final ad, he shapes an ‘S’ into a lasso to control a bucking bull and thereby, ride the market.

 

The campaign also called for considerable technical ingenuity to make the sequences load and play fast without degrading the quality of the graphics. The online design team at th1ng devised a way to shrink each ad to just a 40 kb file, and still pack more rich animation into the sequences in ways that defy conventional web wisdom. The ads started running recently as skyscrapers, banners and leader boards on high traffic websites targeting investors and financial advisors.