Life360’s Tile tracking devices help you ‘family-proof your family’ in Alto’s dark comedies

There’s an absurdist element at play whenever you misplace something—a mix of bewilderment and frustration—that Alto taps into nicely in “Coat,” the first of three spots in the agency’s comic campaign for Life360’s Tile tracking devices.

Hearing his parents argue after he loses his coat, a boy decides he’s never going to take it off again. He goes through life protected, physically and emotionally, in puffy yellow, keeping the jacket on in increasingly inappropropriate moments—when a simple Tile to keep track of it would have sufficed.

Similarly dark humor extends to the other two spots. In one, a father drives around town at night looking for his teenage son (who clearly doesn’t have Life360’s location sharing feature) before having a run-in with the police.

In the third spot, a woman attending a funeral gets trapped in a bathroom. (She could use Tile’s SOS alert feature.) As she cries for help that she’s trapped, her disembodied voice sounds like it’s coming from inside the coffin.

Steve Ayson directed the spots, which turn panic-inducing moment into entertaining vignettes. The campaign is the first to combine Life360 and Tile under one creative direction. It also follows Tile’s brand refresh and the launch of the new Tile trackers, better integrated with Life360.

“Life360 is all about making everyday family life better and this campaign brings that point home in unexpected, even jarring ways,” said Mike Zeman, chief marketing officer. “By exaggerating common family miscommunications, we’re illustrating how our tools can help prevent small issues from becoming major sources of anxiety, ultimately giving parents and families one less thing to worry about.”

Also read: How Life360 embraced teens’ love-hate relationship with the location-tracking app

“When most clients say ‘We want you to scare us,’ they don’t really mean it. But as you can see from this campaign, our Life360 clients really meant it,” said Hannes Ciatti, chief creative officer and founder of Alto.

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