ONLY Because We Can is a short film / commercial that grabbed my attention for more than 20 minutes yesterday. Which, if I had to guess, is probably, about 20 minutes longer than any commercial has grabbed my attention - ever. 

Things to note:

  • there is no play / pause / scrub UI, the short film starts playing the moment it loads, very simple; 
  • there is no “brought to you by blah blah blah” before or after, just a simply ONLY presents that reads so fast I didn’t even really notice it the 1st time; 
  • to pause you click anywhere on the image and it shifts from letterbox to full-frame, which gives a really nice diving-in feel to it; 
  • little + symbols appear overtop of clothing, and if you click on any of those you’re simply presented with a nice slide-in side-panel, nothing ever takes you out of the film; 
  • the sound fades out in pause-mode and you just hear a loop that keeps the mood of the short film going even when you’re exploring, an extra nice touch is the narration, if there happens to be any when you click to pause, keeps going and finishes its line, so there’s no real feeling of interrupting the film; 
  • anything you click on during the short is tracked and presented in a really nice box layout at the end of the film.

But, my favorite part of this commercial, is the biggest box on that end page is a download link for the song, which, by the way, is free - verses a giant buy now link, not a cheap sweepstake endplate asking you to fill out some form. 

They opted to tell a nice little minimalist story, make it fun, and leave it at that. And because they did that, because they were different, it had a real impact on me where banner ads and 30 second spots never do. 

The team behind this did just about everything right, especially considering that 99% of the time companies get squeamish and f#%k up a good thing. I do wish the tweet this button included in it’s default text a @mention for ONLY, it only has a link to the site right now, and I wish this was built on HTML5 so it was more device friendly, but the packet size might have been too large. 

In any case, I really, really enjoyed this. 

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