A man and a woman, both nude, knock on the front door of a suburban home. A lady answers the door. “We’re here because your son just looked us up online to watch us,” the nude woman says. “We usually perform for adults, but your son’s just a kid. He might not know how relationships actually work. We don’t even talk about consent; we just get straight to it.” The man concurs. “Yeah, and I’d never act like that in real life,” he says.

A boy aged around twelve enters the frame in the background, holding a laptop in one hand and a bowl of cereal in the other. When he registers the porn stars—played by actors—at the front door, he drops the bowl to the ground. The mum takes a deep breath and says to herself, “OK, Sandra, stay calm. You know what to do here.” She turns to her son. “Alright, Matty, it sounds like it’s time we had a talk about the difference between what you see online and real life relationships. No judgment!” The porn stars, whose private parts are carefully obscured by a fence, a teacup and the boy throughout, give a thumbs up and a wave as the voiceover comes on. “Many young kids are using porn to learn about sex. Get help and advice at keepitrealonline.govt.nz.”

The 2020 internet safety ad for the New Zealand government by Auckland-based creative agency Motion Sickness became a viral hit. Funny, frank and cheeky with a twist of distinctive Kiwi humor, it was part of the biggest campaign the agency had done in its six years of business at the time, generating more than 2,000 social shares and 200,000 views in the first three days and more than 45 million views around the world to date. Unlike many public service announcements, the Keep It Real Online campaign, including three additional ads that covered online bullying, grooming and inappropriate content, took a serious subject and made it fun to watch. It went on to win local and international awards, including multiple Effies and a TVNZ Marketing Award for effectiveness in behavior change and public sector marketing. It also resulted in a decline in searches for explicit content on school networks. To this day, the agency still gets calls from around the world to use the ads elsewhere.

Motion Sickness founder and executive creative director Sam Stuchbury says if he had to choose a breakthrough moment for the agency, this would be it.

“It got us a lot of recognition and showed that, as a smaller agency, we can still do large-scale campaign work,” he says.

Stuchbury is sitting in his new office in the purpose-designed building the agency has just moved into. It’s a long way from the Auckland studio above a brothel they previously occupied and even further from the “dirty and messy” Dunedin flat 900 miles south of the capital, where he started the business with two friends, Alex McManus and Jono De Alwis, while studying graphic design and marketing at the University of Otago in 2014. “There were eight of us living there, and it was a bit of a party house, so it was a funny place to start a business,” says Stuchbury.

Working for a big agency was never part of his plan.

“I’d always been quite entrepreneurial and creative and thought there might be an opportunity to build a studio; I don’t really like being told what to do,” he says. “When we started, we found working for ourselves really exciting—the thrill of growing the business and figuring things out as we went. A lot of people say to us now, the fact that we didn’t work for another agency and figured it out our own way is a bit of the magic of us and the strength of us because we’ve got our own process.”

Born in South East London, Stuchbury immigrated to New Zealand with his mum, dad and sister during high school. “We came from humble beginnings,” he says. “We weren’t a wealthy family, and it’s not like I came from a business background or anything like that, but I just found it exciting, the opportunity to grow something.”

After the university gave De Alwis, McManus and Stuchbury their first job filming videos for one of its business programs, they picked up work in content marketing and social media strategy before expanding into brand strategy and campaigns. McManus, now general manager, took on the administrative and financial side of things, while De Alwis, who eventually left the business and moved to London, headed up art and design.

Motion Sickness is a business built on friendship. Stuchbury and McManus have been best buddies since high school, making the move from Auckland to Dunedin and back to Auckland together. Hilary Ngan Kee, head of strategy and the third partner in the business, met Stuchbury and McManus at university and joined Motion Sickness a couple of years later after a short stint at L’Oreal. Kee and Stuchbury are also partners in life. The friendship they all share is the bedrock of the company, which has grown to 25 staff members. It’s one of the key things Stuchbury believes sets them apart.

“We’re all very close, and it does feel more meaningful to work with people we really care about,” he says. “We’re like a big family, and everyone cares about the work and each other.”

Stuchbury, McManus and Kee each have their own areas of responsibility and bring different strengths to the table.

“Personality-wise, we’re all quite different too, which I think makes for better outcomes,” Kee says. “For example, I’m a rule follower. Sam, on the other hand, is a rule breaker. You get an interesting alchemy when you put those things together. In any agency, there’s always a healthy tension between strategy and creative, and I think Sam’s and my relationship really works here. We both have huge respect for one another and aren’t afraid to be really honest. The things that work in any relationship—good communication, trust and wanting the best for one another—also lead to success in a creative space.”

The youthfulness of the company (all three partners are aged in their early thirties) also helps them stand out from the pack.

“I think we represent a new generation of agency,” Kee says.  “We blur the lines between advertising, art, culture and entertainment—all grounded in what’s actually going on out there in the real world.”

When the New Zealand Herpes Foundation decided to launch a behavior-change campaign to help reduce the enormous stigma around the infection, which contributes to 30 percent of New Zealanders with herpes experiencing depressive or suicidal thoughts, the organization was introduced to Motion Sickness. Alaina Luxmoore, trustee of the foundation, says it didn’t take long to realize they’d found just the right people for the job.

“We knew it was a young agency, had won national and international awards for successful campaigns, and specifically had already tackled some taboo topics with the greatest mix of creativity, cleverness and humor—exactly what we knew we needed for our ‘impossible brief,’” says Luxmoore. “We invited Motion Sickness to come up with a concept for directly addressing the stigma surrounding a diagnosis of herpes. The initial response was packed with insights that articulated exactly what we had been wanting a campaign to convey. We knew, at that point, there was no one else that would be able to do this brief justice.”

The agency came up with the idea of challenging the nation to become “the best place in the world to have herpes.” The campaign included a Herpes De-stigmatization Course—a web series of lighthearted short films featuring some of New Zealand’s most famous talent—as well as a Herpes Stigma Index leaderboard aimed at motivating participation.

Claire Hurst, founding trustee of the foundation, says Motion Sickness is a one-of-a-kind agency.

“We don’t think there’s another team in the world that could have pulled off what they’ve done with this brief,” she says. “They tuned in, they listened, they heard us and they got it. At every stage of this project, I have been blown away by the innovative and compassionate way they have built this campaign.

“Motion Sickness have been so patient, so kind, and we feel its genuine dedication to this work,” Hurst continues. “[The team] employs and surrounds themselves with passionate craftspeople, not a single one bringing any ego. The experience of being part of the Motion Sickness world has been one word—brilliant.”

But it’s not just the agency’s behavior-change campaigns getting noticed. Frank Energy was a small and somewhat forgotten New Zealand power company in need of a dramatic brand makeover when it approached Motion Sickness. Michael Wood, head of brand and marketing, says that in the course of the creative pitch process, Motion Sickness presented a brand idea that was fresh, distinctive and thought provoking. The agency’s campaign, titled Same Energy. Probably Cheaper, was built on the idea that all energy companies provide the same electricity—whether it’s used to shave your back, toast your bread or juice your vegetables (all hilariously depicted and “tested” in their ads)—so why not go with the most affordable?

“As an independent agency, Motion Sickness has a fearless approach to new ideas, free from the need to get things signed off by the network,” Wood says. “Unlike multinational agencies, it operates as a small business, meaning it understands the challenges of being the little guy and needing to punch above one’s weight. Motion Sickness personnel—Sam, in particular—generally exude a casual confidence, never flustered and always seeming to have things under control despite crazy deadlines or multiple moving parts. I can’t recall working with a more laid-back, levelheaded creative director.”

Motion Sickness’s ever-growing client list includes national and multinational companies such as Big Save, Boring Oat Milk, DB Breweries, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Kathmandu, Les Mills, Vista Drinks and, most recently, US-based company Ora supplements.

“There are so many supplement brands in the States, so Ora needed a unique approach to cut through the market,” says Stuchbury. “Some of the uniqueness and offbeat nature of the style of comedy from Kiwis at the bottom of the world seems to be quite exportable.”

If there is one thing Motion Sickness hates, it’s boring advertising.

“One of the things we’re always saying is we’re an advertising agency that’s bored of advertising,” Stuchbury says. “We look for something that isn’t going to become wallpaper. Traditional advertising that you are just going to push down people’s throats with heaps of media spend is just not what we’re interested in. We make sure the creative has a lot of cut through—that’s a big thing for us.”

Fair to say so far, mission accomplished. ca