CHASING HORIZONS was a unique stunt to raise global awareness for Citizen and drive purchase consideration for the launch of the brand’s most innovative product ever – the Satellite Wave F100.

With limited budget we needed to reach new and existing watch-lovers around the globe. While most watch brands create advertising heavily reliant on celebrity endorsements or slow-motion CGI watch-porn, we decided to physically test the Citizen F100 in a stunt that would accomplish three things:

- Demonstrate the functionalities of the F100 watch

- Achieve global attention for Citizen

- Form the basis of Citizen’s first global advertising campaign in the brand’s 84-year history.

The main function of the F100 is simple - no matter where you are on Earth the watch adjusts to the current time zone in three seconds. Inspired by this, we set out to prove that time can be cheated…

In 2014, CITIZEN was about to reveal its most innovative product ever – the Satellite Wave F100. Renowned only in Japan and a few key markets, the 84-year old Japanese watch brand needed to do something big to raise global brand and product awareness prior to launching the F100.

To do this, we came up with a project that 7 out of 8 production companies said was “impossible”.

We decided to prove that time can be cheated, by chasing the sunset across the Earth’s time zones and endeavoring to live in the same hour for as long as humanly possible.

In the end, we stole a night from the planet.

The story was featured on leading science, consumer, photography and watch media outlets around the world. Even Discovery Channel aired our mini documentary on its global primetime show - ‘Daily Planet’.

In the first few weeks CHASING HORIZONS:

- Received nearly 5 Million views

- Earned global reach of over 360 million

- Drove 140,000+ unique visits to Citizen’s ‘Better Starts Now’ website

- Raised awareness for Citizen and the F100 across the globe

All it took was proving that time can be cheated.

We calculated a route around the North Pole, at a latitude of 80 degrees, where the Planet rotates at its slowest. Then in a precisely planned window of time in late February, when the days were still long but before the Polar Days of March see the sun no longer set, Roberts and Nicol set off from Reykjavik, Iceland. Flying through a new time zone each hour, we photographed the setting sun while the F100 adjusted back to ensure they were living in the same hour.

Despite numerous challenges - from keeping the aircraft steady in the space-time continuum, to frozen engines – the stunt ran according to plan.

The mission was captured in the mini documentary CHASING HORIZONS, and the unique series of sunset imagery (taken at the same hour and same minute, in the same day) were translated to OOH, POS, print and digital executions.