Amazon Books That Reading Feeling Droga5

New Droga5 Amazon campaign celebrates books’ “invisible magic”

That Reading Feeling Awaits uses a variety of animation and illustration styles to denote the imaginative worlds that reading can transport people to

Creative agency Droga5 London has worked with Amazon Books to launch its new global campaign, That Reading Feeling Awaits, which aims to “celebrate the place of books at the foundation of culture”.

The campaign includes six different videos which combine animation with footage of different readers to denote different book genres, which come together to demonstrate the magic of reading, wherever you are.

In one clip, we see a girl reading in a café, which then becomes a Manga-style riff on A-ha’s classic Take on Me video, as characters come alive and break into a fight scene at the table. Then there’s some charming stop motion animation of a man and a dog in a boat, riding the waves that seem to cascade from washing machines as a man reads in a laundrette.

“There’s a magic to reading that modern-day media like streaming or scrolling simply can’t replicate,” says Matt Hubbard, Droga5 creative director. “An intimate relationship between reader and writer, books unlock myriad feelings from joy to sadness to having your mind blown and everything in between. In a world of fast content, diving into a good book has never felt so rewarding.”

Amazon Books That Reading Feeling Droga5

Amazon Books That Reading Feeling Droga5

“Reading feels so special because it’s a co-production between a book and our imagination,” says Chris Chapman, head of design at Droga5. “We wanted to show what this feels like, that while reading looks passive from the outside, the feelings it creates in us are richly multi-layered.”

Droga5 also created social and out-of-home assets which pair simple photography of a reader behind their book with illustrations of their “thoughts” and “inner monologue”.

More than 20 different illustrators, including Dan Woodger, Mat Voyce, Loulou Joao, and Patrick Savile worked on pieces for the campaign in a bid “to create an eclectic treatment that combined vivid textures with the free-wheeling feel of user-generated content”, as Chapman puts it. The agency also worked with Amazon to create a bespoke sticker pack and emojis available through Amazon’s social channels.

The focus on books is an interesting pivot for Amazon, which firmly concentrated on books when it was founded in the mid-90s, and had a seismic impact on the publishing industry. In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Jeff Bezos said that he’d gone for that sector because back in 1994, there was “something very unusual” about it.

“There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other product category,” he said. “One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.” The brand has of course since expanded into selling pretty much everything, as well as branching out into on-demand video, music streaming, groceries, connected devices, and more.

Credits:
Agency: Droga5 London
CCO: Shelley Smoler
Creative Director: Matt Hubbard
Creatives: Chris Russell, Ahmed Ellabib
Head of Design: Chris Chapman
Senior Designers/Art Directors: Hannah Stewart, Matteo Alabiso
Motion Designers: Michael O’Brien, Rob Wicksteed
Post sound and music: String & Tins
Production Companies: Prettybird, Virtual Films, Black Kite Studios, Future Power Station, James Grimes Puppetry, Isabel Garrett/StopMotion, Studio AKA, Studio Private