NOPALERA is a luxury bath and body brand that ran an OOH, truckside campaign with Adgile. Over the course of 12 weeks, 5 trucks drove throughout Los Angeles spreading NOPALERA's message!
Founded in 2020, NOPALERA raised 2.7M led by L’ATTITUDE Ventures and has made headlines for its high-quality products and unwavering mission to elevating the Latina voice, celebrating its founder's Mexican roots, and elevating Mexican ingredients like cactus. And for Abby Haddican, the designer behind this truckside campaign, it was important that the creative reflected all of that!
We chatted with Abby to discuss the inspiration, process, and nuances of designing for OOH (out-of-home)!
What excites you about OOH?
My professional specialties are branding, packaging, and typography design. I do very little advertising work, so this was a fun challenge for me–it really pushed me out of my creative comfort zone. This campaign is also the first OOH campaign that Nopalera has done, so we knew we wanted to make a bold brand statement. As a designer, I'm always trying to find new ways to grab people's attention quickly, and working on a truckside campaign pushes that to the limit: when you have only a few seconds to make an impression, you really have to work hard to clarify your goals and simplify your message.
Tell us about the creative.
Nopalera's whole reason for existing is to elevate and celebrate Latin culture. As a team, we're more accustomed to telling that story on our website and in social media, where we have plenty of space to talk about our mission and our products in a nuanced way. But for this campaign, it was really back to basics. As we began work on this, we had to take a step back and ask ourselves what we wanted to say. Did we want to feature a specific product? Did we want to talk about our ingredients? Did we want to talk about self-care, which is a recurring theme for us on other platforms? Ultimately, we decided as a team that we needed to get two fundamental things across: 1) that we are a luxury body care brand, and 2) that we have a Latina point of view. Everything else is secondary. The idea of the hands holding the product ended up being a great way for us to convey those two points, while also adding a feeling of power and pride that we hope people will respond to. I think the whole campaign, and especially the "Viva Latina!" line, is a bold statement. A lot of brands are fearful of being so upfront about who their core audience is out of fear that they'll alienate other potential customers, but Nopalera has never shied away from it. That's the great part of working with a brand that stands for something. They're not trying to fit in–they're trying to stand out, and I think that strong sense of identity really comes across in the creative work.
What was your favorite part about working on this campaign?
Collaboration! Almost everybody on the Nopalera team was involved in some way, starting with an initial brainstorm and goal-setting session with Nopalera's founder, Sandra Velasquez, and other key members of Nopalera's sales, marketing, and customer support team. I then joined forces with brand strategist & writer
Julie Kucinski to develop a few different creative and messaging directions for the team to evaluate. Once a creative direction was selected, we tapped photographer
Amanda Lopez to create the images we needed for the campaign. The photo requirements for advertising are very specific in terms of how the final images need to interact with the layout as a whole, so Amanda and I worked together closely before, during, and after the shoot to make sure the photography was just right. Throughout the process, we also got great feedback from the Adgile team and made several adjustments based on their advice about what types of creative and design choices work best for the truckside format.
Interested in learning more about the story behind NOPALERA? Listen to our cofounder Tom chat with Sandra Velasquez (NOPALERA founder) on our podcast Driving Performance.
