Brief to Pitch  – Hamlet at Elsie’s Bar

Bit of a context to the story – In 2019, I started working at a hybrid (traditional + digital) advertising agency called Shift Solutions in Sri Lanka. This was after my 3 year stint on digital content/design and overall creative team management role at a mid-stage tech startup and I was transitioning back to more traditional advertising space with digital creative/team lead role.

Around 3 months into my tenure, we got an open brief to the entire creative department to pitch in ideas for this new theatre play by a renowned local English language theatre production company called “Stage, Light & Magic”. The play was called “Hamlet at Elsie’s Bar” – a period musical about a fictional story of how then down-on-the-luck William Shakespeare finding his inspiration to his now famous play in the local watering hole called “Elise’s Bar” and colourful characters he meets on the course. 

Because this is an open brief and English language theatre, the interest was ‌low from all across the department to submit ideas. But as I was excited about entertainment marketing for so long as soon as I heard the brief, I took the opportunity and put together my idea and prepared a deck to present the idea to the internal presentation. I wrote all the text and designed the presentation all by myself. After a couple of rounds of reviews, finally the client was presented with 2 ideas (including mine) and my idea became the selected one. 

As usual, the final campaign that was launched after 3 months looked a lot different from what I envisioned because of a lot of uncontrollable circumstances. But at the end, I was proud to see one of my ideas having “the legs” to go the entire life cycle of a campaign and the ability to put together a winning idea and a pitch deck single handedly with both art and copy skills I developed so far. You can now see the original final pitch deck that was presented below – one of the few cherished work highlights of my career so far.