Ubiquity
The Dirty Word
An office where “outsourcing” gets bleeped like profanity.
Watch the full campaign · 1:17
The Strategy
Ubiquity handles customer service and other behind-the-scenes work for other brands. When you call or chat with a company for help, the person on the other end may work for Ubiquity, speaking for that brand. Ubiquity's tagline is "Outsource Fearlessly." It sells to founders, executives and vice presidents, and some of them are outsourcing for the first time.
The problem is the word itself. "Outsourcing" carries a lot of baggage. Buyers worry about losing control, or they've been burned before. Most companies in the field talk around the word. Ubiquity wanted to say it out loud.
So we treated "outsourcing" like a swear word. In these ads, every time someone in the office says it, you hear a bleep and their mouth gets blurred. Nobody can say it. Then a narrator says it plainly: "Outsourcing shouldn't be a dirty word."
Our first version was set in a meeting room full of bleeped lines, and the bleeps made it sound like the room was talking about something much less work-friendly. Ubiquity said it was too suggestive. Their own brand rule is "clever, never crude." So we kept the bleep, toned down the lines and moved the story out of the meeting room, into a hallway and a cubicle.
In the main ad, two coworkers whisper about it in the hallway, until the new CEO walks up and asks what they're whispering about. The two 15-second ads move to the cubicle of the coworker who wants the change. In one, the coworker who hates change brings him the news. In the other, she catches him on the phone with the new partner. In the 6-second ads, she protests with a sandwich board and begs you not to click the link.
The Process
Brian, our director, and Dan Sullivan, from our team, wrote the scripts. We shot all five ads in one day in September 2024, in an empty office building. We dressed its whole first floor. We brought in several cubicles and set up one wall as the hallway. The CEO's framed magazine cover on that wall is one we made ourselves.
The coworker who wants the change works from home part of the week, so his cubicle looks a little like a home office, with desk toys and joke signs. There are three people in the ads: him, the coworker who hates change, and the new CEO. The script left the change-hater's gender open until casting, so we auditioned men and women for the part. Ubiquity's team helped pick all three from the audition tapes.
Nobody bleeped anything on set. The actors said "outsourcing" every time. In editing, we cut in the bleep and added a pixel blur over the speaker's mouth, the way TV hides a swear.
Ubiquity's team made the ending better. When they saw the first edit, they asked for the narrator to say the word with no bleep. Inside the office, it's bleeped. When Ubiquity speaks, it isn't. The web address became outsourcefearlessly.com to match.
Ubiquity got a 30-second ad, two 15-second ads and two 6-second ads, each cut wide, square and vertical, with and without subtitles. The 6-second ads end on "Book a call at outsourcefearlessly.com." We also made a portrait of each character. Ubiquity built a landing page around the characters, and the ads and the page went live.
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