If you asked five people what “Catching Feels” means, you would probably get ten answers. It is a beautiful coffee-table book, a video on YouTube, a series of webinars, a campaign for Pergraphica papers, a phrase that means falling in love. All of these answers are true.
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One campaign to catch all feels
With Catching Feels, Mondi launched their most ambitious campaign for Pergraphica to date – in the middle of a pandemic. After winning 14 international awards, it is safe to say that their plan worked.
In 2020, Mondi’s premium design paper brand Pergraphica was five years old, still fresh and relatively unknown in a market filled with veteran competitors. At the same time, Mondi’s Uncoated Fine Paper marketing team planned the biggest portfolio extension yet — adding more than 30 colours to a range that was mostly white (and black).
One thing was clear from the very beginning; Pergraphica would need a new lookbook. “Vienna Stories”, published two years before, had paved the way to inspiring creatives by featuring the work of artists, designers and other creatives alike. While a new and improved lookbook was to be the centrepiece of the campaign, it was still just one piece. Mondi was looking for the full experience, across digital and analogue channels, well integrated around a central message.
Enter TRUE, a creative agency based in London that pitched for the campaign. In their very first presentation, they proposed two ideas that shaped the campaign as it stands today. The first: We should collaborate with a brand that everybody in the creative industries knows, Adobe. The second: design paper is all about sensations, about making people feel something, on their fingertips and in their hearts. Thus, the name Catching Feels was born.
For the book with the same name, the team collaborated with the Adobe Stock Premium Collection, scouting artists and building mood boards. Six chapters would represent six different feelings, featuring six different artists. Those creatives were to inspire other creatives and prove how striking photography and illustration can leap off the page on premium uncoated design paper.
We chose technically challenging images from the Adobe Stock Premium Collection. This is our way of not just saying, but showing how Pergraphica rises to the challenges of print.
— Zoe Truchy, Pergraphica Brand Manager
The challenge of creating Catching Feels, the lookbook, did not end with the print quality of the photos. The final book would feature 300 images, across 107 pages, 53 with special finishing techniques such as foils and metallic inks, using 16 paper types, and four different printing technologies.
Which meant finding another essential partner for the campaign — a printer that was up to the challenge. Ralf Vogl was that person. With his premium print shop situated near Munich, he had the experience, the team, the equipment and the right combination of can-do attitude and realism needed for a project of this magnitude.
Catching Feels was ready for launch, with digital and analogue assets covering the full funnel from awareness to conversion, including press ads, banners, social posts, podcasts, sales enablement guides, sales sheets, webinars, flyers, postcards, mailers, notebooks, feelbooks, emails and much more.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The teams went into lockdown and worked from home in Vienna, London, Munich, and many other places. The print industry’s biggest fair was postponed, and then cancelled. That was it when it came to big launch events, creative meetings, dozens of presentations and hundreds of sales meeting, where we would hand over our beautiful new book to customers and prospects.
However, the Catching Feels strategy did not falter in the face of adversity.
Rather than hurriedly building new things, we could scale what we had.
— Bernhard Cantzler, Head of Marketing & Innovation at Mondi UFP
“We had two big advantages in this situation,” says Bernhard Cantzler, head of Marketing & Innovation at Mondi Uncoated Fine Paper. “Firstly, we had started building our digital strategy, our channels, audiences, teams and tools three years before the pandemic. So rather than hurriedly building new things, we could scale what we had. Secondly, we had always planned Catching Feels as a digilogue experience. All we had to do was shift our focus towards the digital part, and we could still launch the campaign.”
Creative sessions with the artists featured in the book became webinars, printed tools were shipped rather than handed over, an international press conference was held virtually, and some funds were shifted to create Mondi’s first major YouTube campaign, pushing the making-of video. “And it worked, better than any of us had expected,” says Bernhard Cantzler.
It showed in the numbers. Millions of people reached on Instagram, hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and double-digit increases in brand awareness as well as lead generation. Even more impressive were the reactions of customers and partners.
When they saw the result, Adobe teams were happy to use Catching Feels as a success story of their own. They not only created an extensive article on their business blog, but also invited the Pergraphica team to tell their story on Adobe’s biggest digital conference, Adobe Max. In turn, Mondi invited Adobe experts to share their knowledge on design for print and colour management in their webinars.
Finally, there are the awards. Lead agency TRUE submitted the Catching Feels campaign to a number of international B2B marketing and advertising awards, and won no less than 14 trophies to date. Among others, Catching Feels was awarded:
- Gold for the Best Brand Initiative at the B2B Marketing Awards
- The Drum Awards for the Digital Industries in the B2B category
- Gold at the ANA B2 Awards for Integrated Marketing Program: Large Enterprise
- Three gold trophies at the BBN World’s B2B Agency Golden Bee Awards
You could say that Catching Feels is an overnight success, five years in the making.
— Bernhard Cantzler, Head of Marketing & Innovation at Mondi UFP
Did Mondi just get lucky, or is there a deeper reason for this success? “You could say that Catching Feels is an overnight success, five years in the making,” says Bernhard Cantzler. “It took time to learn what the market needs, how we have to develop the Pergraphica portfolio, and what our brand is all about. Catching Feels was a perfect storm, but it took months of preparation by a dedicated team of passionate experts at Mondi and with our partners to make it happen.” So, as with any creative project, it is probably a combination of inspiration and perseverance that finally paid off for Pergraphica.
