Nestled between the Silent Partner (“Quiets snoring noise like magic”) and the debut album by a band called The Skirts, Rethink’s “One Dollar One Show” campaign is currently far exceeding expectations on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo.
The off-the-wall campaign is inviting people to pay as little as $1 to have their name included in the credits for an entry in the prestigious One Show advertising competition. Rethink calls it a “project bound for One Show glory.”
A minimum donation gets contributors listed as a member of the “creative team,” while $10 is good for either a writer or art director credit. The titles get progressively more senior and expensive, with $25 earning a creative director credit, $50 nabbing an executive creative director credit, and $100 a chief creative officer credit.
One contributor even ponied up $1,000 for “The Chosen One,” which enables them to choose from any of the titles and claim any hardware won by the campaign as their own.
As of late Thursday afternoon, 210 people had contributed US$3,318 to the effort, far surpassing the campaign’s original goal of $500 to enter the One Show in a single category. The amount raised is currently enough to enter the campaign in three categories, but short of the $5,000 required for the agency to enter 10 categories.
Rethink founder and creative director Ian Grais says the agency has been overwhelmed by the response.
“We’re thrilled with how the industry has picked this up,” he said. “It’s a bit of a self-reflective, cheeky look at how people support and enter awards shows, and it’s also a big nod to the One Show, which is a great show and held in high-esteem in our industry.”
Grais describes the idea as a “creative experiment in crowd-funding,” says the agency is contemplating adding additional credits, including a possible slot for agency partners.
“Some people could say [contributors] are just buying a credit, but we see it as actually creative, because in this case the creative is the community that gets behind it,” said Grais.
Asked about the likelihood of the campaign actually winning a One Show Pencil, Grais was surprisingly optimistic. “It’s definitely an experiment and there are many different categories it can go into,” he said. “If we continue with the social momentum we have, I think it does have some potential in some social categories.”
Grais said he has spoken to The One Club CEO Kevin Swanepoel, and said he is “very supportive” of the initiative, reportedly pledging to match all of the donations garnered by The One Club.
While acknowledging that the campaign is essentially a way for Rethink to keep “its name top-of-mind in the community,” Grais said it is less about attracting new business and more about presenting itself as innovative to potential employees.
According to Indiegogo, campaigns typically raise 42% of their target in their first and last three days, so there’s still an opportunity for contributors to push Rethink to the magical $1 million threshold – in which it promises to give a job to every contributor (pending a review of their portfolio).
The campaign has, so far, garnered contributions from 29 countries.
