The kittens are mirrored across a silver stream. The otters are holding muffins with JOY spelled out in chocolate chips. The rainbows have legs. Somewhere in the pink fur is a fourth creature nobody can confidently identify.
None of it is decoration. Each creature carries a message TopCashback used to deliver in sentences. The sentences were the problem.
The version where somebody explains the product
TopCashback hands people money back and keeps having to prove it isn’t a catch. Uncharted found that every attempt to explain the mechanic made the doubt worse, not better.
“The more we tried to explain the platform the more questions there were about being ‘legit,’” says Laura Jordan Bambach, founder and chief creative officer.
So the obvious route — shopper buys thing, cashback lands, everyone nods — went in the bin. Member research had already found the feeling of cashback arriving beat the money attached to it. The question became what it feels like in the half-second it hits.
Joy spending, cashback joy
The answer was a mirror, and Uncharted committed with the seriousness of a brand out of patience with being doubted.
Everything doubles. The otters high-five into a heart shape, the fourth creature hugs itself in the fur, and the rainbows have legs — which is not a thing rainbows have, and the campaign declines to discuss it.
The line does the same trick: “Joy spending” above, “Cashback joy” below. Two words, second helping.
Then Manchester, where a Metro cover wrap prints the whole scene mirrored across the fold so the paper reads identically upside down — a craft flex almost no commuter will consciously notice, which is the correct number of commuters.
Hand-drawn creatures, AI weather
Every character was hand-drawn by illustrators at Blind Pig from sketches by Uncharted’s creative team, then built out in 3D. The skies, textures and transitions came from a custom AI pipeline.
The interesting part is the credit list. Ric Comline and Matt Burn are named on the AI pipeline line, beside the 2D animators and character designers Andrei Sitari and Christine Peters — hand and machine on one roster, neither filed under “post.”
“By blending hand-drawn character design and traditional animation and CGI with the tactile nature of AI, we’ve created a multi-sensory language,” Jordan Bambach says.
Audio pulls its weight too. Factory built the mix out of musical sounds rather than traditional SFX, under a Lauren Auder track and a voiceover from Samuel Adewunmi doing a lot with almost no script.
TopCashback also got its first sonic logo, from Swedish composer Martin Åberg — permanent, and now running across the ads, the site, the app and social.
What it cost to say nothing
Cutting the explanation meant cutting most of the brief with it. No demo, no mechanic, no reassurance — in a category where reassurance is the reflex twitch.
Every surviving decision was aimed at producing joy the viewer wouldn’t consciously clock. Anything that didn’t got stripped out, including, presumably, several perfectly reasonable slides.
How you sell otters to a performance brand
Uncharted put the client inside the research instead of reporting it back. The team ran member interviews with TopCashback, then joined the platform and shopped through it to feel what they were about to sell.
Chris Delahunty, TopCashback’s head of marketing, describes the job as helping people “switch on their dormant spending powers” — not a sentence that survives a product demo.
Before launch, the films went through DAIvid, an AI effectiveness platform, to test emotional response — a number to hand the room at the exact moment someone asks what a wordless ad full of squidgy animals is worth.
Kitties. Otters. Rainbows. And a fourth thing the press release identifies, with total confidence, as a squidgy planet.
You don’t need to know that. You just go yay.
Credits
Brand: TopCashback
Client: Chris Delahunty, Head of Marketing, TopCashback
Creative Agency: Uncharted
Chief Creative Officer: Laura Jordan Bambach
Creative Director: Remco Graham
Creative Team: Josh Bilimoria, Ericka Ramos
Designers: Yassa Khan, Rich Kennedy
Retoucher: Rob Dimmock
Chief Strategy Officer: Fern Miller
Chief Executive: Hattie Matthews
Business Director: Andy Gill
Producer: Nikki Cramphorn
Production Partner: Chuckles Studio
Production Company: Blind Pig
CD: Ric Comline
EP: Thierry Levy
Senior Producer: Roberta Fox
Assistant Producer: Ben Riley
Storyboard Artist: Andrew Clarke
Character Design: Andrei Sitari, Christine Peters
Background Concept Artist: Xavi Ren
2D Animator: Will Smith
AI Pipeline: Ric Comline, Matt Burn
AI Animation: Ric Comline, Matt Burn, Lawrence Scanlon, Sveety Kolesnichenko
Comp: Ric Comline, Lawrence Scanlon
Audio Post-Production: Factory Studios
Sound Design & Mix: Andy Isaias
Senior Audio Producer: Olivia Endersby
Sonic Branding: Martin Åberg
Music Company: Universal Music
Track: “Smooth Sailing”
Artist: Lauren Auder
Voiceover Artist: Samuel Adewunmi
Learn more
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Laura Jordan Bambach LinkedIn
Contact: la***@*************io.com
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