Phones Crack in the Shape of Cities in Clever Ads for Screen Insurance

Travel is back, which means more places and experiences where you might crack your mobile phone screen. It’s also the return of a clever print and OOH campaign for telecom company Movistar in Ecuador.

The brand offers roaming with screen insurance, a relatively new service in the country. To promote this feature, Publicis Ecuador created a trio of ads where phone screens appear to have cracked in the exact shape of particular city maps—Paris, Tokyo and Berlin.

Each image looks like a shattered, unusable phone, but upon closer inspection, roads, highways and buildings can be seen. The city and time are shown in the ads, along with the Movistar logo. “No matter where it happens, we’ll replace it,” says copy. “New roaming with screen insurance.”

More cities will be recreated into shattered screens later this year.

“The brief was to raise awareness of the new roaming with screen insurance, a unique service among telecom companies in Ecuador,” says Andrés Redrován, creative director of Publicis Ecuador. “We defined the target as men and women, medium socioeconomic status, frequent travelers aged 25-45 with access to mobile devices. We saw satellite maps of world cities in a different perspective, as shattered smartphone screens. We merged both ideas into simple and intuitive executions.”