During the submission process for its International Agency of the Year competition, Ad Age saw a lot of great ideas emerge from around the world. To celebrate some the best problem-solving ideas from agencies that didn’t win the prize, it assembled this list of great client work.
What to do with instruction manuals too difficult to understand
Tok&Stok, an Ikea-like retailer in Brazil, used Twitter manuals to demonstrate how easy its furniture is to assemble by shortening instructions to a series of 140-character tweets. Customers who bought a piece of furniture just had to find the corresponding hashtag, displayed on stickers on the furniture and product boxes. Besides driving home the point that this furniture is easy to assemble, the Twitter manuals caught the attention of a younger audience buying their first items of furniture.
Tok&Stok and DDB Brasil also took the easy-to-assemble message to much odder media, like a Tok&Stock business card that turns into a little paper chair if you follow the instructions. And a puzzle, with the same number of pieces as the item purchased, that shows you how to “make” the furniture as you put together the puzzle.
To bring back a brand, involve former users in a stunt to draw younger customers
Another DDB Brasil client, toy maker Estrela, wanted to relaunch its 1980s toy-train brand Ferrorama. To generate interest among a digitally oriented generation, the company’s president challenged Ferrorama’s biggest online fan group to prove its faith in the toy’s return with a mini-journey along the famous pilgrim’s route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The catch: The little toy train had to travel the last 12 miles of the journey without stopping, even though the fan group had only 120 meters of old train tracks. The journey took five days, as the hardworking fans constantly picked up pieces of track and relaid them ahead of the train. People followed the feat in real time via video and tweets, and could interact with the team through the “Come back, Ferrorama” website.
Estrela relaunched the Ferrorama train set, and the product sold out in a month.
To reach young people, link music and fashion
The iTunes-like StarHub Music Store in Singapore combined music and fashion — two ways young people often express themselves — by attaching radio-frequency identification chips to clothing in stores. When a piece of clothing was taken into a fitting room, it triggered an RFID speaker to play a music track in the dressing room matching the garment’s style. Then a text was sent to the shopper’s phone, offering a free download of the song he or she was listening to. The music and corresponding clothing were divided into 16 genres, including hip-hop, punk, rock pop, folk, ballads and reggae, totaling more than 10,000 songs. The RFID chips were used in eight fashion brands in 42 stores. The effort by StarHub and DDB Singapore had an average click-through of 84% and boosted paid music downloads by 21%.
There’s more! To read the full article in Advertising Age, including mention of Sid Lee‘s work for Videotron, click here.
