Read Yourself Better

The Wall Street Journal needed to help drive membership growth by re-establishing a strong, singular point of view and celebrating the unique role they play in the world. Against a backdrop of endless, low-quality content and misinformation, the Journal is committed to delivering quality news and factual reporting.

The Read Yourself Better campaign was created to wake people up to this with a satirical and pointed rallying cry. We needed to bring the online and offline world to life in a new and unexpected way, to create a visual delight that also broke through the clutter and landed our message. The vision of our director, Juan Cabral, helped us to do that in this hero TV and VOD spot.

We shot a myriad of vignettes depicting the barrage of media and consumption habits in a fantastical way – exploding each of them elegantly to the whimsical strains of Mort Garson’s “Plantasia”, as our voiceover (Boyd Holbrook) guided the viewer to ‘read yourself past’ each of them. The explosions and effects were all executed in-camera and the spot came together with minimal VFX – which felt authentic in this overly-digital age.