Year
2024
Company
Vegetarische Slager & Durex
Vegetarians, Durex and copywriting
Context
The challenge for both De Vegetarische Slager and Durex was for me to develop campaign concepts, each with a completely different objective. One focused on changing consumer behaviour through humour and cultural relevance, while the other explored how an unexpected brand connection could create a memorable advertisement. I wanted to create campaigns that relied on a catchy phrase, copywriting that stayed with you. That meant questioning first ideas, testing multiple directions, and accepting that the strongest solution often appeared much later in the process. The goal became simple: create work that people understand within seconds, but remember much longer.
Finding the insight
Every campaign started with observation instead of visuals. For De Vegetarische Slager, I researched the growing conversation around meat consumption and sustainability. While many campaigns communicate with facts, I noticed that humour often creates a much stronger emotional connection. Rather than telling people they should eat less meat, I wanted to make vegetarian food feel approachable and relevant. The concept played with religious symbolism and the phrase "Jesus says, eat vegetarian," creating an unexpected visual that immediately sparks curiosity while supporting the brand's mission. For the Durex campaign, inspiration came from something far more ordinary: eating fries from a Dutch 'puntzak' (a paper cone). It's messy, and instantly recognizable for every Dutch person. That's because everyone has lived through the same experience of all your sauce being on top, the small plastic fork breaking, your hands full of mayonaise because you just can't eat the fries normally. That observation became the starting point for a campaign exploring exaggeration.
Different directions
First ideas are rarely the final ones, which really came to show in both my campaigns. I experimented with different visual styles, illustrations and art directions before realising that simplicity often made the message stronger. I explored playful illustrations inspired by vintage drawings, but these lacked the impact I was looking for. Moving towards realistic photography made the concept feel more immediate and believable. The campaign for Durex actually started for Zaanse, the sauce brand. This made sense in my head when I combined it with the paper cone. My inspiration came from an exaggeration: you can never have enough mayonaise (spoken like a true Dutch person). While the concept worked, the communication felt predictable and it was overal boring. Through continuous feedback and iteration, I realised the campaign needed a more unexpected twist. The last iterations there was one thing that was important: take it even further. Instead of making the campaign cleaner, instead of perfecting it, I looked up boundaries. I experimented with copy inspired by poems, song lyrics and love letters before arriving at a more provocative direction. By reframing the overflowing mayonnaise as a visual metaphor and pairing it with Durex, the campaign suddenly became memorable. The unexpected relationship between the product and the image transformed an everyday moment into something humorous, slightly uncomfortable and impossible to ignore. That willingness to completely change the sender late in the process ultimately created a much stronger campaign. I decided to do that for De Vegetarische Slager as well. I felt like telling people to burn in hell already took it quite far, but with feedback I was told to take it even further. It was a strong line, a memorable line, and if all the visual aspects supported it, it could be gold. I'll never forget that one of my teachers asked why I was holding back. I was flabbergasted, since I felt I was already majorly overstepping, but I needed to hear that to get to the finish line.
