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‘Best campaigns’ a departure from traditional ad ideas, say industry leaders

Big brands thinking digitally and an exiled newspaper campaigning against government oppression are among the recent campaigns that have captured the attention of agency leaders.  

Panellists at the Mumbrella Question Time event highlighted work for Burger King, the pay TV industry in Spain, the Obama election campaign targeting the Jewish community in Florida and a campaign for a local Zimbabwe newspaper, as recent examples of standout creative work.

Iain McDonald, Amnesia Razorfish creative director and founder, pointed to Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook campaign created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

It involved a Facebook application where people who sacrificed 10 of their friends on the social networking site, by un-friending them, receiving a free Whopper.

“I’m a big believer of social object theory, where you need a really good social object to start a conversation and earn the right to talk around the brand,” McDonald said.

“It had such a strong social object and it became a much bigger idea than the original. It elevated up into mass media as a story and of course Facebook banned the application for breaching the terms of service, but that just made the idea even more powerful.”

BMF executive planning director, Jeremy Nicholas’ pick as the most inspiring campaign in recent times was one out of Spain, where the agency Shackleton was briefed with demonstrating the effectiveness of pay TV in the country.

Instead of creating TV ads promoting the service, it chose the small village of Miravete de la Sierra, with a population of 12, as the focal point of its campaign.

Its residents became the stars of a real tourism campaign called The Village Where Nothing Ever Happens, where people could go onto an interactive website to take a virtual tour of the village. By just day three of it going live, it had attracted 39,000 visitors.

According to the agency, by the end of the campaign awareness of the village had increased by 498 per cent.

“They had an enormous amount of traffic. All these people wanted to come to the village. They created this whole demand and rather than do an ad about the power of advertising they demonstrated it in that way,” Nicholas said.

“Is it direct. Is it promo? I don’t know what it is, but it’s just a great creative idea to what was an interesting business problem.”

For Roger Camplisson, Initiative CEO, the most recent standout campaign was The Great Schlep created by Droga5 in the US. It was part of a brief to help Barack Obama win the US presidenial election.

The key to winning the election were convincing voters in the state of Florida. And the key to winning Florida was swinging the elderly Jewish vote.

The agency created an online grassroots movement to get Jewish grandchildren to educate their grandparents in Florida about Obama. The idea was driven by a viral film hosted by comedian Sarah Silverman, TheGreatSchlep.com website, a Great Schlep Facebook group and Great Schlep-branded merchandise.

“If that brief came into the agency, typically one might think that a media agency response might be okay we need to target elderly Jewish people in Florida. Let’s look at the newspapers and what they get up to. For somebody to think of the grandchildren as the medium is a pretty smart idea,” Camplisson said.

Peter Bray, The Brand Shop general manager, chose the Zimbabwe Trillion Dollar campaign created by TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris for the exiled Zimbabwean Newspaper company in South Africa.

The campaign saw the country’s worthless trillion dollar notes used as the material to create billboards, murals, posters and flyers to protest the impact of Robert Mugabe’s government on the South African economy.

“Massive inflation has meant that their currency is basically worthless. This campaign used the currency – the notes, to make the posters which I thought was a massive idea and it was also beautifully executed,” Bray said.

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