Lucy Punch, Bicester Village and the art of the 20-second ad

How do you use shorthand in an audio ad?

When you've only got 20 seconds, every moment has to earn its place.

Bicester Village has a long relationship with Trisonic built on audio that performs: campaigns where the creative has consistently made the airtime work harder. For their most recent activity, the brief called for a well-known actor. Someone recognisable and intrinsically British; someone Bicester Village’s shoppers can immediately identify with.

Casting a familiar voice is a strategic decision, not just a talent booking. Done well, it acts as shorthand: the listener forms an immediate, positive association with the brand without the ad having to build that feeling from scratch. That's time you don't have in 20 seconds.

We drew up a shortlist, and settled on Lucy Punch (“Amandaland”).

Lucy's trademark charm - warm, witty and slightly self-aware - is a near-perfect match for Bicester Village's brand personality. The right voice, well directed, can do in two seconds what a lesser ad spends twenty trying to achieve.

Working with the client’s in-house team, Trisonic developed a series of scripts designed to do two things at once: deliver the advertising messages clearly, and sound like something Lucy Punch/Amanda would actually say. Those aren’t always the same brief. Getting both right requires an understanding of the brand, an understanding of the performer, and being willing to rewrite until those two things are sitting comfortably alongside each other. The scripts Trisonic wrote for this campaign did that. And when a performer trusts the material, it shows in the performance.

But casting the right person and writing the scripts is only part of it. Getting the performance is something else.

Lucy was filming in Vancouver at the time. So Trisonic organised a transatlantic recording session linking studios nearly 5,000 miles apart. Logistically demanding but creatively essential. Because when a campaign's effectiveness rests entirely on the timing and texture of a single voice, the recording has to be absolutely right.

The result is a series of ads that earn every second of its runtime: personality, performance and craft working together to make sure the media investment does what it's supposed to do.

Twenty seconds. Three decisions, each one dependent on the last. That's audio shorthand.