City Lodge Hotels: Family

Sandy white beaches, lurid sunsets, and cocktail umbrellas afloat in coconuts: think of advertising for the hospitality industry, and these are the cliches that come most readily to mind. It's a sector that leans heavily on the conventional lure of escapist fantasies. Hotels aren't actually selling us room and board; they're peddling daydreams that are meant to draw us in because they're so removed from everyday life. City Lodge has deviated radically from this model, in a new campaign that speaks directly to the banal, workaday frustrations that wear us down.
The hotel group’s new positioning – “Life is hard. Check into easy” – not only reflects the realities of living in post-pandemic South Africa with challenges such as rolling blackouts, it also delivers the antidote with an elevated hotel experience that the chain has been hard at work to deliver in recent years.

The continuation of a relationship almost three decades old, the campaign is the work of TBWA/Hunt Lacaris, and characteristic of the irreverent, contrarian sense of humour the agency shares with its client of 28 years. Both refuse to take themselves too seriously, which has ultimately worked to single out City Lodge as a clever, comedic brand, in a comparatively bland sector.

The films speak volumes – without ever resorting to audible dialogue. Because it’s exactly at the point where one has no words that one should say, ‘bugger it’ and check into easy. To achieve the unbridled emotion from the actors, they were given extremely emotional dummy scripts and they weren’t shown the true scripts until after the shoot

The disjunct between the gravity of the action and the levity of the written captions generates the kind of comedic dynamism that money can’t buy; and in fact, this is typical of TBWA/Hunt Lacaris’s mode of craft for City Lodge – work that’s good enough to flaunt its economy, and which refuses to cower behind a mammoth budget, in order to make a big impact.