Creative impulse

Delaney Fletcher Bozell is pioneering a new advertising strategy for the tea sector with two new TV commercials for Typhoo, which began their run at the beginning of the month. The first features a teenager sent to help out an elderly man in his home, and the second a young girl talking about her newly arrived stepmother. In each case the relationship is strained at first, but improves over a shared cup of tea.

The client: Premier Beverages

Chris Doyle, marketing controller

Typhoo has used a range of different communications over the years, which has left the brand weaker than it might be. It's a good quality product, of which there is high awareness, but that wasn't good enough.

The perspective we took was that we are a small brand in a huge, advertising- led market, and so we were going to have to do something that would get us noticed. Being up against things like the PG chimps, we needed to go for good, cut-through advertising.

But because we're not selling just to young people, we couldn't do anything too wacky or shocking, which are the obvious ways to get noticed.

So we decided to play on the fact that tea is a part of British life - something that people get together and talk over. The brief to Delaney was to associate Typhoo with these positive benefits of tea-drinking, and give the brand an emotional dimension.

The agency: Delaney Fletcher Bozell

Greg Delaney, creative director

If you look at the competitive environment, you see that the tone is generally humorous, light and quite frivolous. We wanted an approach that was more sophisticated and adult.

Tea is liked by almost everyone. It has a unique role in British life, and is drunk in celebration and for consolation. It is something that unites otherwise disparate people, offering a kind of social lubrication. When people communicate, they invariably do so over a cup of tea, and the creative idea emerging from this is that some understanding can be reached between the generations or between estranged people. We're not being so simplistic as to say that it is only the tea that's doing it, but it is part of the solution.

In the first ad, a boy discovers that old people are not "old codgers", and they begin to enjoy each other's company over tea. In the second, a daughter talks about how she discovered a new relationship with her stepmum over tea. We think it's good to associate tea with such positive feelings, and feel this is the freshest thing to happen in this category for a long time.