Stickvertising?

I’ve often commented on the work coming out of St. Bernadine Mission in Vancouver because it’s so consistently offbeat and smart.

This one for client Dog & Hydrant, a store that sells stuff for dogs, takes the biscuit though.

The ad agency soaked some sticks in beef juice, attached a little sales message to them, and then left them on the outskirts of dog parks for Max or Molly to bring home to Master.

Stickvertising? Sniffvertising? Whatever you call it, I wish I’d thought of it.

For the next 70 seconds, you are James Bond

ASSIGNMENT

Create product buzz by promoting an exciting new film.

BACKGROUND

The film and its major  character offer a rich supply of well-known visual and audio cues.

TACTICS

A consumer contest,  a flash mob, viral marketing, zero dollars in paid media.

OUTCOME

One helluva cool advertising idea.

 

 

The original Big Foot on the loose in Victoria

I’m a fan of the advertising efforts for the Royal BC Museum’s latest exhibit, Dinosaurs, Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries.

I always appreciate a bit of eye-catching out-of-home teasers. The giant footprints that lead down Douglas St. towards the museum not only point you right at the exhibition, but also nicely remind us how lucky we are that these massive beasts are only still around in bones and fossils.

Smartly, the footprint theme is popping up in all sorts of places this month, like this transit shelter.

How cool to see a Victoria business trying something new!

How do you sell torture?

Is this the best human sandwich board you’ve ever seen or what?

As soon as I saw it here, I had to hustle to the Torture Museum website and find out more about the barbaric practices of torture over the centuries.

What a racket they had going: public authorities doing as they pleased with the lives and bodies of their subjects in such gruesome fashion.

The devices were imbued with terror-inducing names like The Skull Cracker, The Inquisition Chair and The Heretic Fork. The Heretic Fork!

Hey… c’mon in. Have a seat.

Meant as more than mere displays of church and state omnipotence, they were created to scare the shit out of everyone.

Thank heavens electricity and car batteries came along and we could evolve to far more humane forms of remediation and persuasion.

I suppose now that Amsterdam’s lethal marijuana is banned for sale to tourists, the city needed something else to freak the crap out of people.

From the Museum’s website:

“If this grotesque diversity of instruments of torture invokes feelings of horror, it is no more than the designers’ intended effect.”

Nice.

Using Yelp to rid our streets of chickens

Does spying a man dressed in a chicken suit, jumping from foot to foot and waving an Uncle Earl’s Chicken House! sign at you from the curb make you think of the savoury aroma of a golden-skinned, grilled chicken crackling on a skewer over an open flame?

You bet it does.

That dancing chicken catches your eye and you start thinking DAYUM, I GOTTA GIT ME SOME OF THAT!

Your attention diverted, you drive your car into the cement truck that has come to stop at the red light you were about to drive through. But – and how wonderful is this – your last thought will be of the juices of a perfectly basted and broiled chicken running down your chin.

All because of the man in the chicken suit.

On the other hand.

If you refuse to look at the dancing chicken and instead pull your car over to the side of the road, whip out your mobile phone and consult Yelp for the best reviewed grilled chicken restaurant within a 500m radius, you will avoid driving into that cement truck, your life will be spared and you will doubtless have a superior chicken dinner experience because of it.

Everybody wins with Yelp.

Canada’s social media town takes it up a notch

No surprise if you’re from Victoria to hear that the provincial capital is nutso for social media.

Now, the organizers of Social Media Camp, Chris Burdge and Paul Holmes, have introduced regional awards into the mix.

The first-ever West Coast Social Media Awards are now open for nominations. There are 4 serious categories, and 3 that are more about laughs and twugs than plaudits.

Anyone in Western Canada can nominate and be eligible. So please go to the link here and nominate worthy candidates for the serious:

>> Best Social Media Customer Service Award

>> Most Inspiring Social Media User

>> Social Media Campaign of the Year

>> Best Blog

And the not so much:

>> Funniest Profile Picture

>> Funniest Tweet

>> Most Likely to become a Social Media Celeb

The judging takes place at the end of May and the awards will be handed out during the Social Media Camp networking dinner reception on June 3^rd.

Share it, tweet it, post it and plug it!

Giving new meaning to “loud neighbours”

The way the story goes, the CEO of Adzookie, a free mobile advertising company out of California, was driving by homes with “Bank owned” signs on them. He hit on the idea of paying peoples’ mortgages while they allowed their homes to become monster advertisements for his agency.

He launched the self-promotion on Tuesday and had 1,000 applications by the end of the day.

Could you live in your house if it looked like this?

While I applaud the agency’s ingenuity in self-promoting, the way I see it “Ad agency owned” is not a whole lot more comforting than “Bank owned.”

Plus you have to send your kids to school with paper bags on their heads.

What’s the most important question to ask an ad agency before you hire them?

Ad agencies used to self-promote with paid media. Throw an ad in the newspaper. Not so much any more.

There are cheaper ways of doing it. And these other methods say more about the agency’s creativity, as well as their grasp of the new customer/brand engagement paradigm.

Ad agencies self-promote through contesting; through blogging and connecting in social media; through unexpected promotions, such as making your resources available for free in public places…or hiring a zombie intern.

We self-promote through innovation and thought-leadership. We enter award shows. We vie for earned media opportunities in trade publications and popular press. We write books and publicize them.

We burn through time. Not media costs.

It is any wonder that our clients are questioning the traditional over-reliance on paid media too?

Here’s a question you should ask an agency you’re thinking of working with: How do you self-promote?

The answer will be revealing.

How to make the next Super Bowl half-time show better

The half-time show sucked, right? Course it did.

The Black Eyed Peas just don’t cut it live. I saw them busting those lame moves at the last music awards show. They have a limitless capacity for the half-assed delivery of performances completely lacking in emotion. Boo.

Slap to the face, back on topic:

Nipplegate brought the curtain down on any desire by the Super Bowl half-time show organizers to have the entertainment do something different and memorable. They truck out old Tried & True and cross their fingers that nothing really great happens.

So here’s my suggestion: turf out the dancing robots and make it about the ads.

The ads are the second biggest news story when the game’s done. Show them all on huge screens and give the peeps a chance to rate them. Only get Ricky Gervais to introduce each one. He’s a safe bet not to be controversial.

Or better yet, sell 60-second slots to advertisers and let them pitch their stuff live on stage. Organizing committee pre-approval naturally. Now that’s a challenge any ad agency would sacrifice it’s COO for a crack at.

Live TV? At the Super Bowl? I must be on drugs.

How far away can Victoria be from interactive bus shelter wars?

When I read about the launch of Yahoo! Bus Stop Derby, the touch screen bus shelter games in key neighbourhoods throughout San Francisco, my first thought was: Why not here in Victoria?

Communities compete against each other head-to-head playing trivia games and puzzles available on the shelters’ full-sized screens.

The competition lasts a month or two and then the winning neighbourhood gets a concert with a decent-ish band.

Can’t you picture the Vic West Sustainablists taking on the Oak Bay Tea Partiers? Bus shelter smack down in #YYJ!

My only gripe is that the Downtown Victoria team would need to be labeled The Downtown Trolls Who Hang Out In Front of the Bay Centre and Look Like Survivors From a Post Apocalyptic Halloween Party.

Would you play if it was in your neighbourhood?