As all good things come in threes, I decided to merge three campaigns for my blog. post. All three campaigns are extremely effective and exciting pieces of marketing. In my opinion they not only answer the objective, they answer it with the level of creativity that this marketeer admires!
Firstly, it’s the stunt that makes me smile every time, its Guerrilla marketing at its best! Before I get in to it, let me set the scene; every year the Salon du Livre cle in Paris has a massive book fair that opens its doors to over 200,000 people over a period of five days. The objective of this stunt was to:
“Let people know about Editions Points, a publisher specialised in pocket books, and attract as many visitors as possible to their stand.”
So with the help of some creative’s, the people at Points decided to hire a team of former pickpockets to slip Editions Points books into the pockets of the fair’s visitors. Throughout the day people were finding these books, with the cover reading “Discover the greatest writers in your pocket” with information and offers leading them to the stand.
The results that came after showed that this somewhat radical stunt surged a lot of interest. With almost 1000 books “Put-pocked” on to people over the five days, they saw a 30% increase in their visitors to the editions. Also compared to the previous year there was a 14% increase of sales during the fair week and following month and over 60,000 visitors on the website dedicated for the operation.
Now, obviously some people may not like this stunt and everyone can see things from different perspectives, but that’s the joy of marketing, everyone is allowed have an opinion. But I have to say in this marketer’s opinion this stunt was brilliantly executed and stood out as one of my top marketing stunts.
Next, we have Amnesty international and their Guerrilla/Ambient stunt that left people stunned, shocked and educated. There objective of this campaign was to inform the public about the reality of migrant workers. The campaign was created for International Migrants Day on the 18th December 2010. Many migrant workers enter South Korea to work but their employers treat them like working machines and forfeit any human rights they may have.
Amnesty International wanted to promote this treatment of workers, who were pretty much slaves. To get people to take notice of this they created life-size boxes used for packing goods and used them to inform the public about what was happening. The boxes looked like machine parts but had humans on the display. The stunt successfully promoted their message that “humans are not machines.”
I thought this campaign was executed excellently; it addressed every component of the brief. l thought it was an extremely effective campaign and one that was worth mentioning. These types of campaigns are what I love about marketing and what I feel I could bring to the DAS programme; the ability to think outside the box (no pun intended).
Lastly, the ministry of justice in the Netherlands introduced an interactive billboard in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The object of the campaign was to challenge public apathy towards aggressive behaviour on the streets. The campaign was started to deal with the substantial growth of Public service employees in the Netherlands, such as ambulance drivers facing aggression and violence on the streets. Onlookers unfortunately do not intervene often enough when they encounter a situation like this. The billboards was able to pick up the images of passersby and place them in a pre-recorded violent situation, then providing four tips on what they can do should it happen.
What made this campaign interesting was how it was able to alter something that is already being used all across the world and portray the message so effectively. When I was in New York last summer they had a similar campaign to promote cameras I think. However, this campaign took on a whole new angle as it mixed reality and fiction and really made you shockingly stop and take notice, which was the objective of the whole campaign; Hold a mirror to the face of the public.