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Ritupriya Basu“A marriage of unique combined strengths.” Motion Sickness introduces it’s new arm, Design Office
One look at the website of Motion Sickness, and it’s pretty hard to not get sucked right into their body of work. The New Zealand-based advertising agency, launched by Founder & Executive Creative Director Sam Stuchbury has mined its “culture of disruptive creativity” to shape a series of witty campaigns for leading brands. Interestingly, they’ve also used their craft to unspool societal issues in New Zealand and present them in an approachable way, often laced with a bit of humour – case in point, their viral ad for internet safety that drives home the message in a way that one probably won’t forget.
As their creative horizons have widened to include branding projects, Motion Sickness has launched a new arm of the agency – Design Office. We sit down with Stuchbury, who explains how Motion Sickness and the design agency “live in the same house, but sleep in separate beds,” which allows for “a marriage of unique combined strengths, while retaining the emotional space to be one’s own self,” he adds. Together, we take a look at the Design Office, its scope of work, and ‘Design Translator,’ a little treat on its website.
RB Hi Sam, how are things at Motion Sickness?
SS Great. We’ve had a nice run these past few years and are excited to now launch The Motion Sickness Design Office.
RB Who founded Motion Sickness, and when? Your website mentions that the practice was established by three friends with no traditional agency experience, so what helped you take off?
SS I founded the company with two friends from my dorm room at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand. The idea was to build a creative agency from the ground up, creating work for the new age. We wanted to use our very unconventionality as a way to throw things off-kilter, and put a new spin on advertising and design. There have been multiple trigger points along the way – from signing our first big client, Mövenpick, to making a viral porn star ad to promote internet safety, winning multiple Agency Of The Year metals, making a cookbook for drunk chefs – which have further pushed boundaries and evolved the practice into what it is today. But the thing that has continued to make us grow is simply a desire to make the best creative work in the industry.
RB Since then, how has your practice evolved or grown?
SS The scale of the projects has certainly grown. We’re now the lead strategic and creative agency for a suite of great brands, and with that come some meaty briefs. But although the briefs can be more challenging, the work is more creatively rewarding, too.
RB Looking back, if you had to pick two projects that really speak to the agency’s ability to tackle a brief with originality and wit, what would those be?
SS I would say that, more recently, Rep Your Suburb was a great example of original thinking solving a complicated problem. Early indications from New Zealand’s 2023 census were that the numbers of returned census forms were lower than expected, with a particularly low turnout from Indigenous communities.
Whānau Ora needed to find a way to connect with these communities and remind them why it’s important to be counted. Because information from the census underpins future policy and funding decisions, the census is a vital opportunity for minority and/or underprivileged communities to have their voices heard. The client gave us just three days to pitch, and two weeks to get the campaign into the market.
In New Zealand, area postal codes are a badge of pride; a symbol of where you’re from and who you are. So we created a bespoke pop-up store, decked out with exclusive objects for each area code — none of which was available or for sale anywhere else. The only way people could cop a piece of merch and rep their suburb was by completing their census form.
In just four weeks over 40,000 census forms were completed in an unprecedented result for these usually under-represented communities. The project won the Grand Prix and the Idea of the Year at the 2024 Axis Awards.
You’re Cooked was also a great project. This time, some Kiwi wit and attitude added some edge and cut-through. In New Zealand, one in four house fires start in the kitchen, and half of all fatal house fires involve people using electric appliances while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) needed a campaign that lived and breathed in the world of the young and disengaged, as FENZ’s existing messaging around fire safety wasn’t landing this target group. So we created a cookbook for all of those at-home chefs who were currently using stoves while under the influence – a buffet of crafted and considered recipes that don’t require the use of an oven or a stovetop.
Toast Sandwich, Jacked Fairy Bread, Not-Fried Rice and Kiwi Onion Carbonara are but some of the many fire-free offerings that illustrate the many ways to safely satisfy those late-night cravings – without burning the house down.
The campaign was incredibly effective, providing easy solutions to help Kiwis stay off the stove when they’re drunk or high – we saw a 7.5% drop in unattended cooking. The idea has just won a WARC award for effectiveness, and also received the Hardest Challenge award at the 2023 Effies.
Humour is an effective tool to cut through the noise.
RB Sometimes, your projects are laced with humour – would you say it’s an important tool in the agency’s body of work?
SS Humour is an effective tool to cut through the noise, and with more advertising than ever before, it’s much harder to get attention than you realise. Injecting humour is also useful not only to get noticed, but also for audiences to remember your brand. An Oracle survey found that 90% of people were more likely to remember a brand’s ad if it was funny. However, we do flex tone. Projects such as Our Future Is Māori are a good example of a project in which emotion is used in another way to build cut-through and connect with culture.
We wanted to give design the love and attention it deserves within advertising.
RB Your website had me hooked on the very first visit! What was the thinking behind the design, and why did you want people to be stacking rocks?
SS Agency websites are often jargon-heavy and, ironically for creative companies, pretty boring. We just wanted to have some fun and get people in the right mood before they looked at our work.
RB When and why did you launch The Design Office? What led you to it?
SS The Motion Sickness Design Office was a natural next step for us. Beautiful design and top-shelf craft have always been at the core of our work, so the agency was already delivering branding and identity projects for many of our existing clients. Formalising that into a proper offering felt like a natural evolution. We wanted to give design the love and attention it deserves within advertising.
Translating our culture of disruptive creativity into a design agency felt pretty interesting, too. A modern marriage of brush and pen, art and commerce. An advertising agency and a design agency living in the same house, but sleeping in separate beds – a marriage of unique combined strengths, while retaining the emotional space to be one’s own self.
RB What differentiates the work you do at Design Office from the kind of projects you handle at Motion Sickness?
SS The Design Office has a very distinct playing field from that of the agency. The Design Office will tackle all thinking regarding branding and identity – everything from large-scale re-brands to designing a publication. Within the Office, we focus on the art of design rather than the art of advertising.
However, the marriage between the agency and The Design Office will be harmonious. Sometimes identity projects will start with The Design Office, and then progress on to the agency to introduce that new brand to the world through advertising and commutations. And visa versa – the agency may work on a concept that then moves over to The Design Office to execute the designed elements.
RB Why did you decide to create the Design Translator? How does it fit into the larger scheme of things at The Design Office?
SS Designers and clients don’t always speak the same language. Our translator ensures optimal synergy between creatives and corporations. As a brand, Motion Sickness doesn’t take itself too seriously, but we like to be self-aware. We love what we do, but we don’t lose the perspective that sometimes the corporate work of advertising and design can be at odds – much of it awash with delightful irony and comedic tension. The Design Translator stemmed from an awareness that client-to-designer and designer-to-client communications can therefore sometimes break down. For example, the passive-aggressive and wordy emails often landing on the desks of each partner of the engagement could sometimes benefit from being more direct. Also, we just thought it would be funny to mine such talk and de-code it…
Many of the translations emerged from the weird world of email threads.
RB What kind of scenarios were you looking to ‘translate’ or address? Also, who from the team worked on this project?
SS Many of the translations emerged from the weird world of email threads you sometimes find yourself entangled in mid-project. The whole team chipped in with examples; we also asked friends within the creative industry for some of their most relatable design language barriers.
We then worked with technology studio Grafik to build the site and translator, which in turn brought great flare and style to the site.
RB What keeps the team at The Motion Sickness Design Office inspired?
SS A drive to do the best work in the world.
RB Can you give us a sneak peek into any of your upcoming projects?
We have some exciting brand platform work for Kathmandu – the outdoor clothing and gear brand – coming out of the agency soon, launching across New Zealand and Australia. As for The Design Office, we have a hefty branding project for Social Value Aotearoa releasing soon, which is a pretty unique take on a modern public-sector brand.
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