Agency’s cereal intruder
Staff in the Sydney office of agency The Marketing Store have finally solved a whodunnit which has stretched for weeks, Dr Mumbo can reveal.
After boss Doug Chapman kept coming into work to find the couch in his office in disarray, he became convinced it was being used by staff for illicit late night liaisons.
Meanwhile, huge quantities of cereal and milk kept vanishing from the agency’s kitchen.
Office security cameras gave nothing away, as they kept being moved, so finally staff hid a camera in a cereal box.
They discovered that a late night visitor was slipping into the Mountain Street office via a ventilation panel, helping himself to up to six bowls of cereal a night and settling in for a nap on Chapman’s couch.
But the late night visits came to an end this week, when the agency had a security guard lying in wait to greet the agency’s uninvited guest.
Chapman, who’s not pressing charges, told Mumbrella: “He was very tidy. He used to wash up the dishes and put them away. He’s better than the people that work here.
“For a few weeks there was a lot of finger pointing as we were trying to work out who was bonking on my couch.”
He added that because staff were aware there was a potential intruder, extra care was taken that sensitive documents were not left out overnight, so client confidentiality was not breached.
Can’t a man get a free feed these days?
Seriously this is bloody funny
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Imagine if he wasn’t just cleaner than the average creative at Marketing Store, but he also started reading client briefs and doing all-nighters (or is that all day-ers) thinking up crazy ideas and leaving them on whiteboards, ha
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Lucky he wasn’t a cereal killer 🙂
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That last comment is a crack up!
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Maybe he was peeing in the butter?
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Surely if he eats the cereal he kills, it
so he is a cereal killer
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Come on, how can someone just wander into a professional office night after night without a security pass or arousing suspicion of security staff and hang around for hours on end and never be spotted by anyone???
Smells like the kick off of some sort of campaign me thinks ……
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Does anybody else call codswallop on this story? A guy that bothers to wash up his bowl but not put the cushions back on the couch? Strolls through an office into the kitchen and boss’s office, even has a shower (by the SMH article on this) but evades security cameras. Reportadely comes in at 4am (again from quotes of agency’s Asia Pacific president Doug Chapman in SMH) and sleeps on the couch (what for a full 40 minutes?) Good publicity for The Marketing Store. Made the front page of SMH.
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The Marketing Store website has an Uncle Toby’s breakfast cereal as a client.
Who would allow their office to be broken into daily for four weeks and find it bemusing. Who wouldn’t ask the guy what he was doing “he wasn’t interrogated”. Who would give a vague description about him being neat and in his 30s.
Stunt. Deceit. Lies.
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If it is a publicity stunt, then The Marketing Store should be running a PR agency – not a marketing agency.
The only reason this made it into the public domain was because I was in Doug’s office to talk about something else (Social Media Club Sydney) and he mentioned in passing what was going on.
A bit later, I asked him whether they’d caught the guy, and they just had, so I persuaded Doug to let me move this from an off-the-record chat to something on the record. He didn’t push the story to me – I pursued it.
If this is a put-on, not only is he a brilliant actor, able to dangle a story as bait for weeks without pushing it as a story, but he’s a very good judge of how to dangle a news angle without pushing it too hard.
Again, the usual PR strategy wouldn’t be to place it in the diary column of Mumbrella, in the odds-against hope that the SMH picks it up. That doesn’t happen every day!
Doug did nothing to push the Uncle Tobys angle. A lot of people have FMCG clients. I’m sure if it was chocolate in the cupboard it would have been chocolate that got nicked, and if it was beer it would have been beer.
The slightly sad story is that it sounds like the guy has been living elsewhere in the building before being caught. It strikes me that the way they responded was proportionate – stop the guy from doing it again, but not to make things any worse for somebody already down on their luck.
Doug’ll be able to confirm it, but I think the police were involved on the night. That’s not something you do for the purposes of a hoax. The cops don’t have a sense of humour about that sort of thing.
If this is a hoax, I’ll eat my… cereal.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
In the interests of transparency and authenticity, the story is true and despite having Uncle Toby’s as a client this is not a stunt. I am amazed and surprised by the attention it has been given. There will be no YouTube follow up.
Doug
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Doug, what software did you use for the motion sensor? In the SMH it looks like OSX software & I’d be interested to know what it is.
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Cereal bowls washed up and neatly put away but cushions left willy-nilly around the place. Security and cameras thwarted for 4 weeks…..”office security cameras never managed to point in the right spot to detect anyone”.
Cameras in cereal boxes….”a moment of genius from the woman who runs the kitchen”. Cereal cam….. “showed the man slipping into the office via an overhead ventilation panel”. How does someone get into an air-con duct on the 5th floor?
Even evidence of illicit substances, …”there were some tablets lying around, and some tobacco or weed on the floor”. Laughable, tobacco is brown, weed is green! So which was it, Mr Chapman? I know you know!
Fun launch. Lets hope the ensuing campaign is half as creative.
<};o)
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Why don’t you hire him? Obviously he’s hungry. Make him do odd jobs and so at least he can make up for eating your cereals.
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@ Tim Bennet Linksys (by Cisco) WiFi Motion-Detection Cameras
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My partner has just raised a startling possibility. Perhaps Mr Chapman is telling the truth and his company of boffins really were the victims of a compulsive cereal eater and couch dosser for 4 weeks.
This raises some seriously embarrassing questions about the lack of sophistication and technical nous of “The Marketing Store”. Firstly, why were they unable to direct the security cameras in the right direction?
Secondly, and this is the clanger: why did it take the kitchen lady to come up with the “moment of genius”(Mr Chapman’s words) to suggest installing a hidden camera. Four weeks went by and this idea never crossed the bright and highly creative minds of Mr Chapman and his cohorts.
The hidden camera idea is hardly “genius”. To consider it genius shows a dramatic technological backwardness at the the very least. They have been around for decades and are a staple in security surveillance.
Furthermore, to release the offender without charge or interrogation is remiss in basic due diligence and displays scant regard for the client confidentiality.
If I was a client of “The Marketing Store” reading this front page SMH (online) story, I would be rightfully aghast and considering urgently relieving them of my account. I would also be ringing my lawyers for urgent advice.
But like I said to my partner, this is surely all a joke. Isn’t it?
<};o)
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Hi Phiafly,
They weren’t sure from the beginning that they did have an intruder. As they said, they looked internally to begin with. What would you do if someone had been taking stuff from your fridge? Call the cops immediately? I can think of plenty of offices where someone’s known to snaffle a colleague’s slice of cake “by mistake”.
In the first instance, they checked the cameras that pointed at the door. They didn’t pick up their visitor because he was coming in through a vent. The intruder also knew to avoid the visible cameras, hence the fact they got him with a hidden one.
Does it actually matter who at the agency had the idea to hide the camera? Or isn’t the person in the kitchen entitled to have that idea because she’s not a “creative”?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Tim,
On the contrary! We commend the kitchen lady. She should be promoted. She is a Mossad agent in the making. Our point was the length of time (4 weeks!) the “hidden surveillance” idea took to germinate in anyone’s mind within the company.
Don’t mind us. We are just having a good laugh about this over a smooth red. Thanks for making our Monday.
<};o)
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Glad to hear it, Phiafly – you were taking it all a bit too seriously for a while there…
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
i assure you (and Mr Chapman) we are just highly amused. My partner is a lawyer so naturally she envisages the worst possibly scenario. If our somewhat inebriated comments/observations make you uncomfortable, please feel free to delete them.
<};o)
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We’d better not see the kitchen lady showing where she put the camera with a lovely product placement shot on A Current Affair or Today Tonight.
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Strewth, no need for that, Phiafly. The debate is half of the fun…
I can offer you the next best thing, Percy. I gather you’ll see Doug on Sunrise at 7.15 tomorrow…
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
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has a ring of the Witchery jacket about it
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christ i’m/we’re cynical….retraction, i’m seeing the hand of Naked everywhere. Doug – well done for not pressing charges, sounds like the bloke has enough on his plate (aside from your cereal)
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Sounds like things are gonna get boring now that there’s no more mystery afoot.
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Not questioning the truth of this article but are we at the stage of making submissions without any pictorial or video (pls post video) evidence. If you wanted to get creative you could contact the media store security firm. Its standard practice at least report a crime so this should be on public record.
A number of weeks ago a read an article about a digital agency staffer who posted a video of a foreign object in his take away food. The large chicken chain was not notified & as a result did not have a chance to respond. At the very least the agency had the responsibility to advise the store so that future customers were not harmed.
Not questioning the legitimacy of both examples but I think we need to exercise some responsibility to the general public at the expense of promoting ourselves.
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