Alex Yates
Creative Director
Linh Nguyen
Designer
Manh Nguyen
Videographer
Background
One of the best-known wedding venues and facilitators in northern Vietnam, Trống Đồng Palace is a Hanoi landmark. With all-inclusive service and 11 grand and conspicuous locations around the city, their brand is well known and well loved. The bronze drum (“trống đồng”) from which the company takes its name is an important cultural symbol in Vietnam, and communicates tradition, community and artistry.
Problem
COVID-19 presented challenges for all businesses, but none more so than those that relied on mass gatherings of people, such as weddings and conventions. Trống Đồng Palace weathered the storm, but understood that they would need to market aggressively as the pandemic receded to make up lost ground. Being a long-established brand, they had experience doing their own marketing in-house and working with Vietnamese agencies.
But more than just returning to a pre-pandemic status quo, Trống Đồng Palace was also keen to introduce their brand to a new generation of consumers. They were keenly aware that Vietnam is both demographically young and rapidly modernizing, and that tastes change with each new generation that grows into adulthood. Established brands like Trống Đồng Palace risk being seen as old fashioned or out-of-step if they do not change with the times. A keen awareness of both of these challenges led them to Fourdozen.
Approach
Together Fourdozen and Trống Đồng Palace formed an integrated creative team, including members of their marketing and design departments as well as our own videographers, graphic designers and content writers. We designed a campaign that consisted of three high-concept video ads, as well as three-months of boosted content marketing that would both stay true to the Trống Đồng Palace brand and stand apart from the historical content already on their page.
With a cast and production crew of over 30 people, we filmed three ads that told the Trống Đồng story in vignettes. Innovative use of stop motion and green screen kept the focus on the brand, while creating modern and whimsical visuals that were simply unskippable. Meanwhile our content marketing expanded beyond the traditional posts about venues and menus to include lighthearted takes such as “bizarre weddings throughout history”. Creatively daring, professionally produced, and all done natively in Vietnamese.