Hasta La Ideas

Grey London has created a genre-defying campaign for the new Puma fragrance Sync, trying to tap into the brand’s more youthful target market.

The Dance Dictionary is an online platform that translates words into dance moves and allows visitors to send messages to friends with each word converted into a unique dance move and edited together to form a choreographed sentence. This custom video can be shared on social media or emailed to someone.

The brand collaborated with some of the most high-profile freestyle dancers from around the world and choreographer Super Dave to invent dance moves for 280 words (see behind the scenes photographs by Alex Hulsey below). The Dance Dictionary also includes a comprehensive inventory of dance moves and their definitions for freestylers.

For the campaign, Grey London also commissioned Brooklyn-based Dancehall producer Dre Skull to create an original track. It launched earlier this month with a music video shot by director Daniel Wolf.

This isn’t the first time the agency has ventured into commissioning original tracks. In 2011, it created YES Records for Lucozade, commissioning and releasing three tracks – an original collaboration between Tinie Tempah and Travis Barker which had more than 11m YouTube hits, the original composition Louder from DJ Fresh, which became the highest pre-order in iTunes’ global history and an unsigned band cover of Freeder’s Buck Rogers.

So the agency clearly has form in drumming up a youthful music audience for mainstream brands. It remains to be seen whether the dance communication makes it beyond the social media sharing and onto the everyday parlance of music-savvy youngsters, but Dance Dictionary, which will also feature in a TV commercial across Europe, certainly offers a more innovative approach to the usually staid fare of perfume advertising.

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