Situation: Nescafé Decaf accounts for less than 2% of sales in the range. Even though coffee consumption is increasing in South Africa, decaf remains flat.

Brief & objectives: In a category that is growing, we needed to raise awareness of the benefits of decaf coffee and recruit coffee drinkers by finding a reason for decaf to exist within the coffee-consuming target audience.

We placed 7 press executions across national newspapers which are a hive of financial, crime and gossip news - the things that keep our minds awake at night. We wanted to use this context to reflect in our press ads, where each execution shows different people’s nighttime anxieties and overactive minds, leaving our audience with the feeling of “Yeh, that was me last night. Maybe I should switch to decaf.” The answer of course, is DECAF YOUR MIND.

Faced with anxiety-inducing daily economic, political and personal insecurity, South Africans have a lot bouncing around their brains. SA coffee drinkers also have an average of 3.4 cups a day - but only 2% choose decaf. There’s really nothing much giving our minds some peace – so we wanted to demonstrate the narrative of what happens in people's overactive night-time minds.

We collated hundreds of weird night-time thoughts, from earworms to random streams of consciousness and recreated the most entertaining ones.

These were placed as 7 different ads in national newspapers to show how decaf coffee can help put our thoughts to bed and help DECAF YOUR MIND.

South African coffee drinkers enjoy on average 3,4 cups a day – especially in the mornings with their newspapers. We therefore placed our ads in national newspapers (34% reach of coffee-drinkers) as a demonstration of how much ‘noise’ is in people’s lives, with the answer being how decaf coffee can be a solution to helping one’s mind shut off.

However, in and amongst this noise, there was nevertheless an opportunity for Nescafé (as South Africa’s leading coffee brand) to bring a bit of lightness to our situation.

This campaign has recently launched so we have not received data for brand perception or sales.