The Curio - Celebrating Media Creativity

With Think Fresh ‘08 upon us, we thought we’d look back at the life of media creativity and celebrate 10 of our favourite examples of great creativity and bravery from around the globe that you may not have seen before.

San Fran Zoo - Bringing out the animal in you….grrrrrr

The San Francisco Zoo have produced a beautiful campaign using a series of local bus shelters adorned with horns, butterfly wings and oversized ears representing all the animals at the zoo. The idea is, you get your photo taken in front of the sites to upload onto the Zoo’s website. The best pictures will be chosen for the Zoo’s advertising campaign. This is a new campaign but already hundreds of people have uploaded their photos. We love this idea quite simply because its fun, it has people interacting with it, and it hits the mark with sending people to the website. Check them out here: http://www.oursfzoo.org/


Making TV Advertising Event Viewing
Honda made TV history this year with 2.2M people tuning in to watch their TV ad in the UK. The 3 minute stunt took up an entire ad break in peak time on Channel 4 and saw sky divers jump from a plane to form, one letter at a time, the word Honda. The amazing thing about this is it was all done live. The media and creative agencies along with Channel 4 worked closely together to bring this great example of bravery to life. It could have been done as a pre-recorded ad, but they took the tag line, Difficult Is Worth Doing literally and did it the hard way. Garnering huge amounts of PR and discussion, before and after the airing, Honda’s UK media agency said: "It is the biggest, smallest campaign ever, just one spot but look at the impact.”


Dialing Up Creativity
When the 118 118 directory service launched in the UK, the brand was up against the category behemoth British Telecom. With two hirsute 70’s styled runners as the brand heroes, the campaign was truly brought to life through the unconventional comms: -Tens of 1000’s of 118 118 singlets were hung on washing lines in key cities for people to steal and wear -The runners travelled around the country for 8 weeks in a retro ice cream van entertaining consumers & giving away the 118 118 singlets -To make the shirts an icon in their own right, they were framed and hung in private health clubs throughout London. Within the year, 118 118’s prompted awareness was at 95% and the brand stole and has maintained the leadership position in the category.

These examples are a couple of our favourite Grand Prix winners from the Cannes Advertising Festival. Yes, one is from our very talented cousins across the Tasman…we’re not being biased…this one is GOOD! If you want to see more great media work that’s won at Cannes, visit the site: http://www.canneslions.com.au/

Biomat Cleaning Religiously
To grow market share, Biomat washing powder specifically targeted the Jewish Orthodox sector in Israel, a market almost unreachable via traditional media as many don’t own TV’s or radios. Orthodox Jews have strong beliefs associated with aiding the weak, so Biomat connected their idea to this belief and developed a way to help the needy. “Bring your unneeded clothes to us, we will wash them with Biomat and distribute them to the needy” A Biomat-branded truck fitted with a giant washing machine was the main feature of the campaign. The details of the truck’s locations were communicated via street posters, at point of sale and in Orthodox press. Biomat's shares in the Orthodox sector, 15% of the Israeli population, grew by 50% after the activity, and the campaign has continued on.

Pago – A License to Print on Money
Pago is a virtual wallet linked to a bank account allowing users to text money to and from mobile phones. A great tool targeted at a young ad avoiding audience keen on innovation and technology. OMD NZ found that innovation and new media was the key to connecting with their target audience.
•The campaign used Hypertag and Bluetooth technology in bus shelters to give away free money vouchers, directly motivating registration.
• With permission from the Reserve Bank they created a media first by stickering $5 notes with the Pago image. The notes were then put into regular circulation, surprising the audience.
• An interactive billboard was made up of 30,000 post it notes for consumers to peel off so they could take the Pago message with them.
The campaign exceeded awareness results by 21% 2 months from launch. With a fresh and creative approach to out of home media as well as a coming up with a media first, this campaign was a great success in delivering a new brand and a complex message to a tech savvy target audience.

We couldn’t call ourselves advertising people if we didn’t showcase some of the brilliance from the OMD network.

Making a Tiny Budget Work
In a bid to increase their share of line rentals in the Dominican Republic, Tricom made the cost of phone calls to the US the same price as local calls, less than 1 peso. With only US$5K to promote this, OMD placed stickers on 1 peso coins delivering the message “Start calling the US for less than this”. They stickered 150,000 pesos and distributed them in busy supermarkets, circulating the coins at rapid pace. The coins spread throughout the country and within 1 year line rentals with Tricom grew by 260% with no other major activity in the period.

Breaking the Mould of Book Marketing

With the Disney’s adaptation of Narnia; The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe about to launch, this was the perfect time to reignite excitement about the book that started it all. OMD UK came up with a campaign to Read it before you see it. Copies of the 1st chapter were sampled extensively in cinemas and on public transport where the audience are looking for a read. Downloadable samples were also available online. This campaign broke the mould of book marketing in the UK and proved a success with the €145,000 budget increasing sales of the book by 800%.

A lot of great creative media work has been done with outdoor and as a channel it has been keen to showcase new technology and methods that deliver on creativity. Here are some great examples that we love showing how the outdoor medium has helped make the message stronger by encompassing the immediate surrounds.

Amnesty Brings Suffering to the Streets
Amnesty ran 200 poster sites throughout Switzerland to illustrate the Human Rights abuses that are taking place each day. Each poster image was matched to the surroundings and gave the impression that the victims were literally sitting on the streets of Switzerland. Orange-clad and hooded Guantanamo prisoners looked as if they were shackled and left on the Zurich pavements.
The campaign was discussed on over 400 blogs, triggered a editorial features about human rights abuse and achieved a twenty-four fold increase in traffic to Amnesty International’s website.




Making the Medium Fit the Message
TBWA in Brazil used one of the most polluted tunnels in one of the world’s most polluted cities to promote World Car Free Day. Instead of pasting a billboard in the tunnel, they scraped the grime caused by car fumes from the walls of the tunnel to write: “Walk. Ride. Bike. Take the bus. Use the subway for less pollution. 9/22 is World Car Free Day”. This idea won on PR by delivering $6M in earned media value and reached 4 million drivers in the city.



Heinz Souper Billboard
A giant 3D soup pot positioned on an outdoor site that faces three lanes of traffic heading out of central London for Heinz has been seen by an estimated 1.2m people each fortnight as they head home for dinner. The live pot is programed to emit steam and look like a boiling cup of soup. A great way to speak to hungry commuters on their trip home on cold winter nights.