Advertising Archives - Marlon Tate

The Obvious Guide to Driving Excellence

With a fleet of 15,000 vehicles, Executive Lease is one of the largest car-leasing companies in Greece. But in a fiercely competitive market, the brand struggled to attract new customers. To cut through the noise, Executive Lease needed a bold reinvention — one that would reshape the brand into “the obvious choice for car rental” and wake people up in an unignorable way.

Our solution was a fresh creative brand platform: “The Obvious Guide to Driving Excellence.” We launched a digital campaign built around a series of faux driving rules that blended the bizarre with the blatantly obvious. Each script combined irreverent humor with sharp cultural insight. Each rule was brought to life as a short “how-to” film, styled after cult VHS tapes and narrated by the velvety voice of renowned actor Renos Haralambidis.

Rule 1: Don’t drive with your boxing gloves on (If your car is terrible, punching it won’t help — but you can always lease a new one from us.)
Rule 2: Don’t recite Einstein to your car (If it isn’t smart already, quoting physics won’t make it smarter — but you can lease a smart car from us.)
Rule 3: Don’t practice gardening inside your car (If it isn’t green already, planting flowers won’t make it greener — but you can lease an eco-friendly car from us.)

Each film combined imaginative storytelling, playful direction, sharp editing, and a retro visual aesthetic, supported by a full omni-channel rollout. The campaign dropped three hero spots through the end of 2025, smashed past 10 million TikTok views, and sparked a 25% surge in brand awareness and business leads.

Loumidis Coffeeshops

In 1920, the Loumidis brothers started a small coffee roastery in Athens. Loumidis Coffeeshops quickly became a beloved brand across Greece capturing everyone’s imagination and conquering the country’s heart. In the decades that followed, the Company grew into a successful network of stores and its brand became a symbol of success, love and creativity. By 2024, however, its loyal customer base was aging, threatening the brand’s long-term vitality. True to the Company’s original values, Loumidis Coffeeshops decided to reinvent its brand for the new era and for the new generation. Marlon Tate was invited to help clarify, define and express a new vision for the future, and help the brand re-assert its magic — all while staying true to its existing customer base and strengthening the bonds that have made it so successful for over a century.

Heritage brands occupy a unique space, but they face a recurring challenge: they are often seen as unchanging, dusty, or old-fashioned — appealing only to disconnected, elite audiences. The question was clear: how can Loumidis Coffeeshops become relevant to a new generation of TikTokers, gamers, and modern coffee lovers without alienating its loyal, mature audience?

Through a series of immersion workshops, we worked with Loumidis Coffeeshops stakeholders to capture the heritage and essence of the brand, whilst evolving it into the future.

Insight
Nostalgia became the bridge between these two very different demographics. Older customers reminisce about the 1970s and 1980s, while younger audiences gravitate toward contemporary media influenced by those decades — from Mad Men to Stranger Things, and music with retro vibes.

Solution
We reimagined Loumidis Coffeeshops by diving into the brand’s archives of 1960s and 1970s packaging and print ads. The result is a dynamic, retro-futuristic identity that positions Loumidis Coffeeshops as a love brand. The new identity introduces a modernised logo, based on a short-lived version from the late 1960s, updated for digital-friendly use and aligned with the brand’s contemporary positioning. Our creative platform, Forever and Ever, symbolises the brand’s ability to transcend generations while motion design, patterns, and colour palette reference the brand’s heritage. Working closely with the marketing team, we revived discontinued favourites like ”Louminita” and introduced limited editions such as ”Loumilk”. The refreshed identity will roll out across all touchpoints — from social media to packaging — in 2026.

Moda Bagno

Moda Bagno is one of Greece’s most influential luxury furniture and home goods brands. With its impeccable curatorial eye, the luxury brand has been a tastemaker for five decades, dramatically shaping homes in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.

In 2024, the iconic brand turned 50 and approached us to create a celebratory brand identity and campaign. Our intention was to celebrate the brand’s heritage of 50 years of style so to reflect this, we centred the campaign’s look around a “dynamic” logo system, featuring 50 custom kinetic logo-idents that reference different styles of furniture and interior design and also nods to Moda Bagno’s role in bringing them into Greek homes. To top it all up, we developed a viral month-long campaign that encompasses 200 unique print, digital and outdoor executions plus a limited edition of shopping bags, membership cards and merch as well as a spin off publication evoking nostalgia and old internet energy. We really wanted to reference the brand’s unapologetic creative heritage by creating something that’s fundamentally off, but is also funny and superfluous.

Isabella’s Restaurant

Isabella’s is a new bistro restaurant that opened in 2024 inside The Twenty One Hotel in Kifisia, Athens — a neighborhood known more for quiet elegance than culinary notoriety. Open exclusively for lunch, the restaurant draws inspiration from Kifisia’s Belle Époque history and takes its name from Isabella, the original owner of the historic building. While the location had charm, the challenge was clear: how do you make a lunch-only bistro stand out in a city teeming with culinary options?

Marlon Tate was invited to create Isabella’s brand narrative and identity, giving the restaurant a personality as rich as its menu. We crafted a concept steeped in nostalgia and 1970s European luxury, imagining love letters, postcards, and ice cream as the restaurant’s ingredients. The identity is anchored around a custom-drawn logotype, designed to carry across all communications and tie the concept together visually.

The resulting identity is playful, sophisticated, and unmistakably unique — a place where history, style, and culinary delight meet in every detail.

Vakalo College of Arts

Vakalo College of Art and Design is the first school of Applied Arts in Greece to offer programmes of study at tertiary level. Founded in 1958, with a history of 65 successful years, it has established a reputation as the foremost design education institution in Greece, and among the top colleges internationally.

Marlon Tate’s Creative Director, Nikos Georgopoulos, started teaching at the iconic art School in late 2023. As a means to promote our collaboration with the Art School, we wrote, directed and produced a TikTok reel inspired surreal TV ad to celebrate the beautifully unexpected nature of creativity.

Marlon Tate Press Kit

Marlon Tate is a tiny but mighty creative agency that lives for narrative-driven branding and ads, fuelled by fiction, surrealism, and the occasional healthy delusion. Officially, we’re based in Athens and London. Unofficially, we also operate out of Jupiter and Mars, because every “serious” agency seems to have offices in New York, Milan, and Shanghai. We preferred to aim… higher.

When it came down to promote our creative services, our objective was simple: tell journalists, clients, and rival agencies who we are and what we do. Instead of creating a standard PR folder, we created vacuum-sealed “space bags,” inspired by NASA food packaging. A physical, immersive story that positioned Marlon Tate as the first creative agency with offices in space, while spotlighting our real superpower: storytelling. Inside each bag was The New World Times — a completely fake newspaper packed with fictional news (that we wrote), fictional ads (that we made) for fictional products (that we wish they had existed). Readers could check the weather on Mars, read an “exclusive” interview with our creative director, Nikos Georgopoulos, about running an interplanetary agency, and dive into ridiculous stories like Rorry Ross, the flamboyant CEO of Open Planet, launching a space-age mood stabiliser called Moondyz. According to the overexcited (fictional) writer of the article, Moondyz has revolutionised space travel, saving travellers from missing performances at the Galaxia Opera Centre or posh dinners at Hilton Loona due to rocket-induced breakdowns. Side effects? Minor. Mostly just electric-blue hair for five days. Worth it.

Paradise Quarter

Commercial developer Blue Residences is creating an ambitious residential complex, located in the ‘posh’ suburb of Marousi. Set around an incredible park and the most ambitious business district of Athens, this new place will offer a sophisticated collection of beautiful and spacious apartments, elegant living spaces, unique amenities, smart features and stunning views towards the city. Looking to encapsulate this ‘blissful’ take on contemporary living, we helped them name, brand and shape a bold and completely new idea, which we called ‘effortless living’.

By considering the above, we positioned this place as a flourishing community at the intersection of contemporary urban and suburban living. We created a brand narrative that highlights one simple truth: this is the ideal place to live. Our first step was to name this exciting place ‘Paradise Quarter’ to reflect its scale and strategic ambition. Our concept was to make everything look ‘paradesian’ and pop, aiming to resonate with the audience, consisting of young families and first-time buyers. Drawing upon visual language often associated with paradise, we constructed fluffy cloud messages to evoke the ‘paradesian’ feeling that naturally, effortless living would evoke. The campaign launched with a small plane flying around Athens with a banner featuring the tagline ‘Effortless living forever’, positioning Paradise Quarter exactly where it is meant to exist; in the sky. Following this guerrilla marketing stint, the number of people discussing it and documenting it on social media grew rapidly, leading to high numbers of people visiting the website and the marketing film that we created. One week later, we launched the print campaign in newspapers, OOO, as well as digital ads on websites and social, expanding on the narrative. We also designed and art directed the marketing brochure, hoarding, and pavilion filled with plants and water fountains.

Aiming to avoid the slick branding typical of new developments & smart living, every creative decision that we made, was carefully orchestrated around our narrative responding to a simple question – ‘how does it feel to live in Paradise?’.

Hellenic Institute of Architecture

Since 1992, the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (EIA) have been discussing and acting on issues related to design and the built environment through a multi-faceted programme of exhibitions, events and conferences. Looking to stay relevant within the architectural scene on the back of their multi-decade stint as a cultural landmark, the Greek non-profit organisation turned to Marlon Tate for a reimagining of their brand.

Architecture is not about organising space; it’s more about creating the space and essentially constructing the presuppositions for living, in the same way that the EIA creates space for discussion and architectural ideas. On that basis, we could’t really create a static symbol for the EIA because by nature, space is fluid, variable and dynamic. And so we created a variable logo that changes shape to respond to its setting. The resulting identity system repositions EIA as a dynamic generator of space for architectural discourse, utilising the sheer scope of the discussions and ideas they make possible as its core concept. The new branding explores the possibilities of the logo as a frame to put work in, or a stage to place work on. The new identity and website of the EIA is expected to fully come into effect within the next couple of months as part of the engagement comms programme undertaken by the Berlin based shop Design Ambassador.

Jolles House

Nestled in Bromley-By-Bow, Hackney, Jolles House is a historic building named after Sir John Jolles — City of London merchant, member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, Sheriff of London (1605–1606), and Lord Mayor in 1615. Once a quiet landmark, it is now being reimagined through an ambitious redevelopment by Poplar Harca and Pollard Thomas Edwards architects, transforming it into a cultural and residential beacon with 70 new homes for young professionals and families drawn to culture and East London’s famously vibrant community. Ahead of its launch, Marlon Tate was tasked to develop a new place narrative, brand identity, environmental graphics, and launch campaign for the housing project.

Our strategy was inspired by the City of London itself, where past, present, and future coexist in extraordinary ways. Drawing on heritage, local vernacular, British typography, and the specificity of place, the brand identity, wayfinding, and marketing campaign reflect London’s layered history. The resulting brand identity and visual language, constructed entirely by screenprinted tiles, references the disrupted aesthetic of old and new layers of torn posters — an approach that mirrors the city’s rhythm and, perhaps, illustrates exactly how the future gets in.

Ilior coliving

Ilior is Greece’s first major co-living scheme. Formed in 2018 by Daniel Lyssy, it aims to create exceptional spaces for young and creative professionals who work from home. Ilior One —launched in the centre of Athens— is the first of the brand’s instalments. Indeed, Ilior is in the process of building an ambitious network of plug-and-play spaces and buildings across the nation, that will radically transform the way Greeks live.

We were given creative freedom to brand this unique scheme. Similarly to other Mediterranean South European capitals, Athens is not very familiar with the concept of co-living. With this in mind, we decided to change the subject completely and position Ilior as an imaginary country.

Inspired by the notion that ‘our house is our castle’, we developed an overarching modular and flexible identity system that draws upon the idea of a ‘special place’. For this purpose, a responsive brandmark that references the concept of a flag becomes central to the identity. A flag of an imaginary country where people can dream freely; work collaboratively; debate fruitfully and develop. By drawing upon the flexible architecture of Ilior spaces, the brandmark expands and contracts across different formats, as required. To further illustrate its uniqueness, the colour palette embraces bright pop colours, that no country in the world would ever use for its national flag. This country is entirely imaginary. In fact, that is its strength. Welcome to the land of the dreamers.