Cory Ingwersen’s recent browsing history might be a little questionable.
Ingwersen is a senior designer at 88 Creative who spent two weeks researching agency names and porn movies for the Toronto agency’s new Buzzfeed-inspired quiz Agency or Porn?
The online site features the name of 72 agencies from around the world and another 72 porn movies. It invites participants to guess whether names like Elastic People are associated with flexible creative minds or flexible actors (it’s the former).
The idea for Agency or Porn came from an internal brainstorming session for the agency’s next marketing initiative, during which a staff member mentioned an agency whose work they admired.
“Someone said ‘Their name sounds like a porn movie’ and that’s where the nugget for the idea came from,” said 88 Creative’s managing director Erin Bury. “So many agencies do have these names that can double as sexual expressions, and we thought it would be funny to have a microsite that challenges people to tell the difference.”
It turns out there are a lot of agencies out there with names that could be a euphemism for sex; based on my score, it can be hard to distinguish between the two. Do you know Wongdoody from your Spong, for example, or your Raging Lust from Tasty Placement?
Every correct answer is rewarded with a breathy female “Oh yeah,” while wrong answers earn a brusque male “No.”
The quiz is the latest in a series of attention-getting initiatives devised by 88 Creative, which came up with last year’s “Missing: Rob Ford” posters that were picked up several media outlets including Jimmy Kimmel Live, and a Buzzfeed quiz called “Would you fit in at 88 Creative?”
Both were low budget efforts boasting a high “shareability” factor. “We’re a small agency so we don’t have a ton of marketing budget, and we also want to show off our online creativity,” said Bury. “We really wanted to come up with an idea that has the same type of reach and impact as the Buzzfeed quiz.”
88 Creative is supporting with offline marketing including posters in coffee shops in the vicinity of downtown Toronto’s “agency alley,” and postcards and stickers sent to agencies featured in the quiz. It is also posting images related to the quiz on its Instagram and Twitter feeds.
And let’s just take a moment to give thanks that there isn’t an agency out there called Bush League (2012, starring Dick Chibbles, Mika Tan and Jack Vegas).
