With its tiny size and turning circle, when you want to weave your way through a busy city, you can’t choose better than a smart. Our brief was to communicate this in a simple and charming way, with a print and poster campaign. Our aim was to further strengthen the smart brand, by continuing to establish it as the perfect city car: the obvious choice for urban drivers.

To powerfully communicate our message, we needed to convey the character and charm of the smart: together with the life, character and craziness of the big city. The city is represented by the needle. So we needed to capture the essence of it by using as our subjects, three leading European cities – for our cosmopolitan European audience. To do this we chose a hand-drawn line illustration style, to bring the cities to life in a cartoon-like way. Using iconic features and landmarks of each city, together with more generic urban elements, such as streets, cars, people, birds and planes we created chaotic, unique and instantly recognisable urban scenes. The thread going through the needle was then the road. The smart itself is on this road, heading onwards in the far distance, having easily weaved through all the obstacles the city can throw at it.