Sympervising: How to get millions of people to talk about your brand
by Fred Roed on 05/08/09 at 1:27 pm
2 comments
An Indian company called Aircel put up this billboard with a rubber dinghy suspended by a rope from it. The idea was that if one of India’s infamous monsoons struck and left people stranded they could cut the rope and row to safety on the Aircel dinghy.
SpringWise reports: Aircel’s billboard, erected by outdoor agency Primesite near Mumbai’s Milan Subway, bore a large, inflated dinghy along with the line, “In case of emergency, cut rope.” And on July 15, such an emergency did indeed arise when monsoon floods made the Milan Subway virtually impassable. The rope was cut on Aircel’s billboard, the boat was released, and stranded pedestrians were ferried to safety. The result? Near constant local media attention for Aircel, even including the headline, “Aircel did what [government agency] BMC did not.”
Awesome stuff. This relates to something that Mike Schalit said at Brand Hooligans last week – that brands must think beyond traditional channels, and advertising agencies must focus first and foremost about the big idea, and then how to transmit that idea in the best possible way.
In Aircel’s case, the big idea was that they’re there for their customers. They certainly proved it in this case.
Read more here (Aircel website), or here (Springwise website)
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.
Tags: advertising, advertising agencies, creative ideas, Environment
Dan
Aug 6th, 2009
Brilliant! Love the idea, love the execution and who can argue with the results!?
I think this hits the nail on the head “brands must think beyond traditional channels, and advertising agencies must focus first and foremost about the big idea, and then how to transmit that idea in the best possible way.”
This is one of the reasons why we started ideabounty.com – brands need to be constantly in search of the next big out of the box idea and we believe that this can only be done by tapping into a much wider creative thinking pool than any agency currently (or will ever) posses.
Once again brilliant – heres to more big ideas!
Gareth Cotten
Aug 11th, 2009
Wow. Watching what’s happened in Taiwan recently, I can only hope someone out that way has taken a leaf out of these guys’ book…