Cocoe Produces Typographic Commercial For El Tesoro Público

Span­ish mul­ti­me­dia label The Cocoe Con­spir­acy produced a delightful commercial for El Tesoro Público, a department of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Finance. The entirely typographic motion graphics piece promotes Treasury Bills, called Letras del Tesoro in Spanish. Letras del Tesoro are short-term fixed income instruments which exist only in book-entry form, and are issued with 3, 6, and 12-month terms.

"Letras" in the specific context of the Public Treasury is the name of the Treasury Bills, yet it also means "letters", as in the alphabet. Spanish agency Contrapunto – part of the BBDO network – made a play of words and designed a series of purely typographical posters for the Letras del Tesoro campaign. The slogan "En Tesoro Público puedes elegir cualquier letra que imagines" roughly translates as "At the Public Treasury you can choose any letter you can imagine", referring to the different terms the short-term securities are issued with. Starting from Bodoni Contrapunto created a number of imaginary remixed characters, and created intricate typographic compositions with them.

Contrapunto commissioned PsychoTypoGraph short – to turn those posters into three separate 20 second television commercials. Working with the existing materials, they conceived the storyboard, produced the typographic animations, and did the post-production. Carlos Berlanga's song "Lady Dilema" from his 2001 album Impermeable was used as background music, and a voice-over added. The finished product is a stylish and strikingly elegant video. It is wonderful to see how fluidly the letters morph and glide across the screen. Plus I just love the old paper look of the background and the subtle texture of the graphics.

You can view one of the clips below, yet the video on the Cocoe website is of much better quality. That version is a mix of the three 20 second spots, with a 10 second segment (the blue one) added at the end.