To mark California Pizza Kitchen’s 40th anniversary, the brand did not celebrate. Because literally nobody cares about a brand's birthday, and also, because we are from California, and therefore in severe denial about turning 40. Call it a mid-life crisis, if you will.

In a short, sharp activation window, Iris went from relaunching a new look CPK to the world, to realizing the errors of our ways, then eventually being guided out of this nonsense by long-time brand advocate (and former employee!) Busy Philipps. This micro-campaign kicked off late March by launching a completely WTF version of the CPK brand – so "try hard" to be cool, it might just be real. Through a range of fake brand launch content, we did what Jaguar did, but didn’t mean to. We set out to get consumers, marketers, and rival brands to ask ‘is this for real?!’ and that's exactly what we've done.

We then had a moment of intervention, seemingly organically, from Hollywood actress (and former CPK employee) Busy Philipps. She saw our work, and wanted to talk to us.

Fast forward a couple of days, when we dropped a 60-90 sec mockumentary style film directed by a renowned comedy director, and featuring Busy Philipps – this tongue in cheek film highlights Busy’s intervention behind the scenes at CPK. Taking us from the hypebeast, age denying pretender, back to who we really are – a brand that has 40 years of constant innovation, unwavering quality and unbeatable freshness behind it. A brand that is timeless. Here’s to the next 40. It's a great case study on a how a heritage brand (in a very tough category), can achieve big things without huge production budgets and media money.