Walrus Whizzer

Virgin Media O2 today launches the third chapter of its ‘To Better and Beyond’ campaign, ‘Walrus Whizzer’, an integrated campaign from agency of record VCCP, which highlights the freedom that better broadband brings.

Set to the soundtrack of Billy Ocean’s ‘Suddenly’, the 60” hero campaign film emulates the unstoppable feeling experienced when using Virgin Media broadband and spotlight’s the provider’s recent ‘Best Broadband Experience’ award win from GWS.

The humorous and memorable film follows on from award-winning campaigns ‘Highland Rider’ and ‘Goat Glider’, this time featuring a walrus, climbing out of icy waters in a fishing harbour and hopping on to a speedboat. It hits the controls and cruises off into the distance with confused locals and a group of envious walruses looking on as it speeds away. The walrus lets out a roar of happiness as it skims across the waves.

VCCP and its global content creation studio Girl&Bear worked with Swedish artist and director Andreas Nilsson and film production company Biscuit Filmworks to bring the film to life. The award-winning director has recently worked on films for Apple, Uber Eats and Volvo and shot ‘Walrus Whizzer’ in his home nation.

They once again turned to Emmy and Bafta award-winning Untold Studios to create the unstoppable ‘Walrus Whizzer’. The innovative and complex production process began with CG rendered shots, and a bespoke asset build of the walrus through complex 3D models. These were brought to life through a team of animation supervisors and further development within FX to ensure realistic simulations of the characters movement. Complex lighting models were created within CG to make all of the shots look utterly realistic and photographic which then handed over to the composition team to embed rendered images into our real film plates and craft our final touches, like lighting glints, film grade and lens flares. 

The resulting film is a distinctive and unexpected story of a maverick walrus discovering his mojo and working out how to move faster and more smoothly through life.

Simon Valcarcel, Marketing Director at Virgin Media O2, said: “This latest campaign celebrates the feeling Virgin Media broadband delivers to our customers every day. Smooth, fast and reliable. Being recognised by GWS as providing the ‘Best Broadband Experience’ only confirms what our customers already know - they are truly unstoppable with us.”

David Masterman, Deputy Executive Creative Director at VCCP, added: “With our Highland Cow and our Goat we brought to life just how unstoppable Virgin Media is. We’ve been on land and in the air. It was time to take to the high seas. And, let’s face it, Walruses have a lot of personality.”

The campaign launches today and will run until 27th October across Cinema, TV and VOD, Online, D/OOH, Social and Radio. Media planning and buying was managed by MG OMD. Creative digital agency Bernadette also worked across the integrated campaign to bring digital, social and online elements to life.