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The entertainment marketer’s calendar is littered with annual events: Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Mental Health Awareness Month and Hispanic Heritage Month are some of the major entries. The challenge with these occasions is to produce creative that feels authentic to the experience that people the events are attempting to celebrate are having. And sometimes brands fall short. 

When Hulu wanted to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 through October 15, it reached out to inclusive agency Bien, who in turn reached out to Argentinian artist Sebastian Curi to produce a campaign that came from the heart. 

Bien’s mandate since the time Ricardo Roberts and Hung Le opened its doors in 2017 is to incorporate diverse points of view in front of and behind the camera, be representative of those points of view and create work that is accessible for everyone. 

In this week’s Spotlight Q&A, Roberts and Curi talk about how they collaborated on their campaign for Hulu, which brought a fine art approach to a channel branding experience.

‍Spotlight: How did this whole project come about? 

‍Ricardo Roberts, executive producer, Bien: One of their producers reached out to us and said, ‘Hey, we have something interesting that we think you might like.’ And of course, we were like ‘tell us what it is.’ And it was a visual ID branding assets package for Hispanic and Latin American Heritage Month. So of course, me being who I am, and our company being what we stand for, we were all like ‘hell, yeah. Let's do it. Let's figure out a way to make it happen.’ 

‍Spotlight: At what point did you bring Sebastian into it? 

‍Roberts: Originally, Hulu was looking to do more of a 3d design. That was where their mindset was. They asked us to create five different looks so that they could pick one, and one of those looks was what we considered to be our wild card, our more risky option, and that was Sebastian's art. We have been familiar with Sebastian's work for quite some time now, and we thought it would be perfect. It would be so different, so bold, and it would stand out. We just felt like it needed a more homegrown and human approach. 

So we came up with this idea and we pitched it to Hulu. We thought there was no way in the world that they would go for it. We pitched it and they loved it. Of course, they had to go through their stakeholders to get it approved. That's where we thought it was absolutely going to get killed, because the package was not only for Hulu, but also for all of the Disney properties. But they approved it, and we got to go ahead to do everything with Sebastian's artwork.

‍Spotlight: Much of Sebastian’s work focuses on hands, and that’s the direction you went with for this campaign. What about the hands did you think was right for this? 

‍Roberts: Hulu worked with a strategy agency to help them understand the Latin American audience in the U.S. What they came back with was really interesting. It was basically, how do you define the undefinable? Because the thing about being Hispanic or Latino or Latinx in the U.S. is that we're all so different from one another. We're all joined together, and we're combined by language, but we have so many different backgrounds and cultures that are sort of melded together. It's impossible to define our culture as one thing because here we tend to identify more with our countries of origin. I'm originally from Ecuador. so I really know and breathe and love Ecuadorian culture, whereas Sebastian is from Argentina, and he identifies as Argentinian. 

That's why we landed on the hands, because the hands are universal. The hands are human, and they are representative of everyone. We felt like the hands were the absolute perfect way to combine these disparate cultures and ethnicities and represent and sort of define what is undefinable.

‍Spotlight: Did you and Sebastian together come up with the idea of the hands, or how did that idea emerge? 

‍Roberts: The cool part about it is that we wanted Sebastian to have complete artistic freedom to do his thing. He is known for those hands. While he does a lot of different designs, if you look at the bulk of his work, the majority has some elements, some motif, of the hands in there. And so we were like, Sebastian, we don't want to dictate what you do. Just do your thing, make it Sebastian and then we'll animate it. We'll bring it into the Hulu brand. It’s really important to us to support and uplift artists. That's what Bien is all about. That's what we stand for. 

‍Sebastian Curi:  My work for these past three or four years has been mostly with hands. It's a subject matter that I chose to explore to develop my practice. Most of my work is really about me and how I see things. But of course, as a Latino, there are things that just bleed into the work.

Tom Hanks was in a movie about Mr. Rogers a few years ago. It had a lot of meaning to me. I saw Mr. Rogers and I thought that was a very Latino way to be, this guy who is so friendly. That’s what I’m trying to push now – the idea that we’re all in this together so we can be friendly, that it’s going to get better for everyone. 

‍Spotlight: Sebastian, you also have worked in creative branding and marketing and done some motion design, correct? 

‍Curi: I initially started working in the creative industries. I work a lot in branding. I did a lot for Disney and Fox and HBO and a lot of networks. So I know how you develop a branding identity, whether for a TV channel or a streaming platform. 

Everything I did before this is informing the work that I'm doing right now. It is really useful to speak the same language. We were like, okay, this is a graphic promo. We're going to have 12 assets to deliver and we had to do the project on a time frame. We also wanted to set expectations correctly. You want to be sure that the level of ambition is correct. Sometimes if you show too much, you create false expectations. But we were 100% aligned so it was very easy to work together. 

I was really happy that Hulu took a leap of faith and said ‘we’re going to endorse this artist and his work’ – that says a lot for a streaming platform. 

‍Roberts: Sebastian has made an awesome career out of being an artist. He's got an amazing studio in downtown LA.

Hulu did a couple of interview pieces with him and he did one for ABC News. They went into a studio and interviewed him and then walked around his neighborhood, which is Chinatown, and just really spent time with him and got to know him as a person. Because of this one project, he got so much reach.

That's what we live for – we want to give underrepresented artists opportunities. One of our mottos is ‘designed with, not for’ so we felt like we had to get someone with lived experience like Sebastian to do this campaign, and for us to be able to put him in front of Hulu and millions of other people that was really special for us, and we're so glad that it all worked out.

‍Spotlight: Can you expand a little bit more on what you mean by inclusive motion design? 

‍Roberts: That’s how we began the studio in 2017. Hung and I had been in this industry for 15 years and we had noticed that no one really championed diversity and inclusion in motion design. There are a lot of advocates in live action or on the agency side, but no one on the design side. We thought we could start a studio that was built from the ground up to give people opportunities. We as people were looking for something to make our business endeavors mean more. For us, it wasn't like, hey, we want to start a business and we want to create beautiful art and work with cool clients, and that's it. For us, it was more like how can we  create something deep and meaningful?

We came up with this methodology we call inclusive motion design. It's built on two major pillars, and those are representation and accessibility. We want to do a good job of being diverse and inclusive on screen and behind the scenes, paying attention to culture and true diversity on screen. When we design or draw or illustrate, we want to be sure that it is accurately representative and authentic of diverse audiences. And then we were also adamant that our teams behind the scenes that create that work are also diverse in nature. 

We also advocate for accessibility. There are more than a billion people on earth that live with some form of disability. So whatever we create, we want to ensure that it is as accessible as possible. So that can mean something as simple as designing with people that are colorblind in mind. Or making sure that the typefaces we use are large enough for people that have visual impairments. 

It's all these little things that we put into our work that no one else pays a lot of attention to. 

RELATED: Bien Tells Quadriphonics' Brand Story

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