Zespri International Ltd is the world’s largest kiwifruit marketing company. Its world-famous green and gold kiwifruit are produced by more than 2,500 local growers and 1,500 international licensees, which means bringing growers along on the Zespri brand journey is key to Zespri’s success. To engage their partners, the senior Zespri team typically takes their show on the road, visiting growers all over the country.
Datacom previously partnered with Zespri to reimagine its online grower portal, Canopy, leveraging our scale, technical skills and UX/UI design capabilities to relaunch their portal in just 10 months.
We've obviously had a working relationship with Datacom for a long time,” says Brett Hartman, Head of Data, Analytics and Enablement at Zespri.
“That was particularly in our grower experience space in recent times, but we kept hearing about the additional capability Datacom had – it just seemed like a really good opportunity for us to explore some other things that Datacom could bring to the table outside of their core expertise.”
When it came time to share their growth strategy for the next 10 years at nine roadshow events worldwide, Zespri approached Datacom with a completely different kind of brief: to bring their 2035 strategy to life for audiences, and do so within the creative boundaries of a highly creative theme: time travel.
“These events showcase what's possible in the future, and unite the organisation around those future capabilities,” says Julie Fisher-Somervell, Global Demand Strategy Leader at Zespri.
“When we were building the Time Machine event, we wanted to have a ‘wow factor’ element – really challenge ourselves regarding how we leverage technology.” The video also needed to integrate three members of Zespri’s leadership team with AI-generated fantasy elements created for the overall design by Zespri’s agency partner.
To solve this challenge, Datacom brought together our in-house writing, visual design and illustration teams, as well as our own animators and video editors. We quickly decided that as a counterpoint to the slick overall presentation of the event, a hand-crafted, hand-drawn aesthetic would add variety and texture.
“We could have just had three people stand up and talk about brand, global supply and the portfolio of the future, but it's really hard to have those people in person across nine events around the globe. So the challenge was working out how to do this more dynamically and creatively.”
We wrote a script that translated the 10 year-plan into a voice-over the three leaders could read, with a particular focus on making the information easy to digest and remember. Then Datacom’s in-house Concept Designer, Bryan Nimo created illustrations that allowed for a combination of text and comic-book style graphics.
“We saw this as an opportunity to really leverage Bryan’s expertise – it’s quite unique,” Hartman says.
And while human illustrators created our animation elements, AI image generation was used to bridge the gap between the polished, stylised look and feel of the overall event and our hand-drawn animation aesthetic.
These elements were brought together for the final animation, which depicted the Zespri leadership team stepping into a time machine and going on a fun and futuristic hand-drawn journey spanning 10 years of kiwifruit innovation.
“It hit the mark in terms of giving [the audience] sufficient understanding, being a teaser, and being exciting and creative in terms of the whole feel of the day,” Fisher-Somervell says. “It came across really well.”
“This creative project shows the breadth of capability we have at Datacom, as well as the lengths we’ll go to deliver what our customers need,” says Sean McGarry, Creative Director of Datacom’s Consulting team.
“We love working with Kiwi companies like Zespri to help them achieve their aspirations and bring their stories to life, and this animation project was another way we could do that."
Part of being a truly local partner with longstanding customer relationships is that when an organisation like Zespri needs something that's a little 'out of the box', the Datacom team can pull together the breadth of capability required to make it happen.
