Branding / Advertising / Design
SanDisk needed to break into a music player market that the iPod had completely swallowed. Instead of going head to head on features, we created iDon't, an underground movement that turned the iPod's ubiquity into the joke and positioned SanDisk as the choice for people who refused to follow the herd.
The campaign launched as pure street level rebellion. No big media buy, no polished launch event, just wild postings, stencil style posters, stickers, buttons, and street postcards dropped into cities where the right kind of music fans would find them. The iDon't.com site served as the home base and call to arms, a meeting place for free thinkers to share blogs, anti iPod art, and ideas about what music culture could be outside the white earbud monoculture.
The art direction leaned hard into protest poster and graffiti language. I created the illustrations across the campaign, including the iSheep, iFollow, iChimp, iDead, iPuppet, and iDroid characters, each one a visual jab at conformity rendered in high contrast, spray paint inspired stencil work. We extended the world with a six part cartoon series in The Onion called Flocking Hell that lampooned mass market mindlessness, plus satirical print ads featuring real characters like the iHip, iTool, iCheese, iChump, iSore, and iSweat, each one a portrait of someone trying way too hard to be part of the club.
In under a month, the campaign pulled over 250,000 unique visitors with almost no paid media. From there it expanded into print in subversive publications, billboards, and t-shirts. Within weeks, iDon't had blown up globally and become a top ten trending topic across the blogosphere, exactly the kind of organic, word of mouth ignition that traditional tech advertising almost never achieves.