The traditional deal was the following: you get exposed to loads of ads (TV, print, online etc.) with the hope that ultimately you’ll take out your wallet and pay for a particular product/service. Now something changed. And I noticed that while playing around with Grooveshark and Spotify, two streaming services that allow listening to music online.

You can stick to your basic account which is still good, it’s free but full of ads (banner ads, audio messages). Or you can upgrade to a premium/VIP account for an ad free experience. In other words: ‘You need to pay us to stop advertising’.

Agency: Harrison Troughton Wunderman

Client: National Phobics Society (Anxiety UK), one of the leading charities for those who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)

Their budget was very small so conventional creative work was out of the question. Instead of doing that, they tried generating media coverage by inviting journalists to a news conference staged by the National Phobics Society.

One of the most common forms of OCD is the obsessive need for order; those who suffer from this must have everything neat and in its place. This was the insight that the agency used to roll out their campaign.

They sent journalists (those responsible for health-related issues) a computer keyboard in a box. On the outside of the box they had the line ‘We think it’s time you wrote an article about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder‘.

When they opened the box, they would find the keyboard. BUT, on a closer inspection they would notice that all the keys were rearranged from the usual QWERTYUIOP format to ABCDEFGHIJ, mirroring the sufferer’s need for order. The line on the inside of the box was ‘But try writing it as a sufferer‘. The copy underneath was the press release.

Using a budget of less than £3,000, they succeeded in gathering 19 journalists to attend the press conference. The National Phobics Society was covered in The Times, The Sunday Times and The Independent. Their PR work also resulted in BBC dedicating a 12 min. slot to both the charity and their marketing campaign during a prime-time show (commercial air time worth £400,000).

They proved people are more likely to accept news story rather than just a piece of marketing. With a small budget they remarkably managed to cut through the clutter and go a very long way.

I found the case study in Steve Harrison’s book ‘How to do better creative work‘. I’m just about to finish it; great learnings both on marketing and communications, warmly recommended!

Saatchi & Saatchi were in full process of refurbishing their reception area ,so all the space in front of the building was looking like a mini-construction site, surrounded by white panels. On the panels they left an ad friendly message through which they said ‘Bill posters will not be prosecuted’.

The guys from TBWA, situated not very far from the site, were creatively challenged by this opportunity. They took the message from the panels really seriously and, in their attempt to play a prank to their rivals (a guerrilla marketing move, as some considered), they glued a huge message on the panels: ‘You’ll get a better reception at TBWA’. A totally valid action, as there were no message forbidding that. On the contrary.

They completed the prank by calling a BBC crew (it was 7.00 am) to record the whole operation; BBC was actually working in that period on a documentary about the advertising industry.

Extra, 10 examples of guerrilla marketing campaigns.

What are the odds that once your media plan is established you go ahead with an unconventional advertising campaign of branding all the elevators from the office buildings .. Your agency buys space and goes ahead with running the campaign .. So far, so good. Until you get this phone call being told that you got someone really pissed. Being told that you’ve branded some elevators with your logo, the elevators from the same building the market leader has its headquarters in!?

True story.

I was reading this part while being in the metro on my way home and I couldn’t help myself starting laughing when I saw the next part: ‘When the chief engineer at the Rolls-Royce factory read this, he shook his head sadly and said: It’s time we did something about that damned clock!‘

Hard times require hardcore ideas.

Marketing, PR – these are not the only fields that evolved dramatically in the last few years. So did the ideas behind the social campaigns: they have left the conformism behind, reinvented themselves and searched for inspiration in the modern trends.

The French team that initiated Save your logo have come up to the conclusion that, to attract a global company into a social campaign it takes more than involving it with only it’s name. They need to deliver something that would make consumers react, that would feel emotionally attached to and so, motivating the company to get involved as well.

Save your logo invests it’s funds in biodiversity and conservation of the endangered animals – those ones that serve as logo for many of the multinational companies.

PS: Even though until now they only have 3 global partners, if they succeed in reaching no more than 15% of their goals, I still consider it as being a great achievement.

Picture: Springwise