Welcome to part two of the guerilla marketing school. Let's take a look at some case studies. These are personal case studies. I've worked on myself at my time at cutting. One of the first guerrilla marketing campaigns I worked on was for FM men's magazine. They were looking to promote the 100 Sexiest Women edition of their magazine.
Their objective was to generate national PR. They wanted to reach more people than their advertising budget would allow if they use traditional marketing means. One of the assets we had to work with was a picture of one of the models from the magazine. Her name was Gail Porter. She was a bit of a controversial character for posing in this magazine as she was a former BBC presenter. Around this time, projection technology had fallen in price and it become more mobile.
So the idea was to project Gail Porter naked 18 foot tall onto the side of Big Ben in the Houses of Parliament, this tiny in the picture into the voting idea With the magazine. The resulting media coverage was considerable. In fact, 40 million people in Britain got to see this publicity stunt, making it the most successful PR stunt in British advertising history. Visual juxtaposition can be an extremely powerful way to grab someone's attention. This was our thinking behind the publicity stunt we created the Dockers clothing. game of football isn't newsworthy by itself, but it is when you float a real sized soccer pitch with grass and look like players down the Thames.
It was an image the media couldn't resist and it resulted in over $2 million worth of free media coverage for our client. Word of mouth is more difficult to quantify the media coverage, but we can safely assume it would have been considerable for this stunt, as many millions would have witnessed it from the bridges the buildings and the roads that overlook the Thames. Clients highly prized word of mouth. As we are far more likely to listen to the opinion and stories of our friends and colleagues. Then we go from an advertiser this really spectacular PR stunts are off fantastic way to get attention, but often just getting attention isn't enough. If you can get attention and create an unforgettable experience for your customers, then you will have a much more powerful piece of communication.
When British Airways approached us to promote their Caribbean holidays brochure, we decided to recreate a real sand beach in the center of London. We knew that a massive real sand beach in Covent Garden would provide a fantastic picture for the media, we wanted to do more. We knew if people could experience a taste of a Caribbean holiday, they'd be far more likely to want to go on one. So we had a beach games volleyball, a real bar, sweepstakes, and other components to draw people into the publicity stunt and interact with the brand and the sales proposition in a much more deeper and engaging way. Australian actress and singer Kylie Minogue had to deal with British Airways at the time, so she came along and post the cameras and rounded off the day's events with a high profile celebrity photo call the result of the client many millions of dollars worth of free media coverage, not to mention a huge amount of good word of mouth and interaction by the public.
But more than that, it helped me a move away from its state and stuffy image into a more playful and fun company. In short, the kind of company would like to go on holiday with supplementing your traditional advertising with a more free thinking approach to marketing is a great way of fostering brand appraisal. This may be why sci fi channel approached us a few years ago to help promote one of their shows called the triangle. The triangle was a six part miniseries, it was based on the phenomena of the beauty triangle. The tagline to the show was nothing stays lost forever. So we contacted 200 friends and asked them what do you lose?
They told us they lost things like the channel changer keys, a cell phone. And somewhere on the list was the missing sock and the launderette the missing or lost sock and the laundry as a kind of universal appeal. It also has some humor, and intuitively it just felt right. The last sock campaign because system have two parts. The first part was a number of posters, which had last sock reward for finding it. The reward was a gaming system and a home theater.
Along with promotional details, the website carried a trailer for the show and for the program information. The second part of the campaign was to print 300,000 lost stocks with a strap line and website. Nothing stays last forever.com individual stocks within placed in Washington fold packages of launderettes across Manhattan and 10 of the US states. Although this could be seen as intrusive, we've got away with this and people enjoyed it because of the sense of humor and this kind of insight about the missing sock. In addition to the word of mouth, we also received some great press coverage. This is a full page piece in The Wall Street Journal.
This was an important piece of media coverage for the brand because it signaled they were growing up and moving forward. It showed the new approach to programming and also the new approach to marketing. The new deodorant is called dove visibly smooth, and we took a look at this product and the promise it was making as an inspiration for our big idea of ultimate visibly smooth, made one clear promise. It promised to reduce the look and feel of underarm hair over time. And it was this promise, which led to our big idea, which we called the pedicure. The pedicure was to your underarms what a manicure or pedicure wrist your hands and feet.
Strategically. This was very smart as it allowed us to move away from the subjects of underarm hair and odor, and to talk about skincare and beauty. We began the campaign by sending out beauty packs. These were beautifully designed packs that we send to beauty editors and bloggers. The packs contain the product itself, along with the letter from our celebrity dermatologist, Dr. Deborah left. All this information allowed us to educate the public before the launch itself, using long lead and long form content such as blogs and magazines.
Online, we created pedicure spa, which would feature is the full episode player content on nbc.com. viewers were invited to interact with a spa, they could click on the computer to interact with it via social media. They could click on the diary to see when the physical pedicure spa was visiting their hometown. They could also click on the product itself to learn more and get a two for one coupon. This high level of interactivity and the the warm, natural human feeling environment we produced led nbc.com to tell us that this was the most successful full episode player they had ever run. Now let's take a look at a very short video to see how it looks out in the field.
We are promoting the new deodorant. And basically we're getting pedicures here. Never heard of a pedicure. It's like a pedicure for your toes. This is a pedicure for your underarms which consists of shoulder massage as well as the hand massage the exfoliation of your elbow. And you're under our tribe.
It's actually really amazing. They're laughing sort of unexpected because you don't usually pay attention to that part of yourself. It's really hard today and I went in there and I got the pedicure, which I had no idea what it was like this pedicure. And I feel like a million bucks and be like, I just took a shower. I feel great and I smell good too. It's something that everyone should try.
The pedicure experience was a huge success. It was sold out every day. And on average, women spent 15 minutes with this product. We impacted 500,000 women and we handed out 2 million sticks of deodorant. I'm a big believer in offline engagement and online amplification, we can reasonably assume that the 500,000 women who experienced the pedicure went on to tell all their friends about it either socially, or on their social media networks. All the various threads of the particular campaign from the experience from the banner ads to the sampling lead to one place, an online portal, where women could learn how to do a step by step pedicure at home, they could also learn more about the product and send away for a discounted version to try themselves.
When Mini Cooper approached us to develop some free thinking marketing for the launch of their new car, the first thing we did was to take a look at the competition. The traditional way to launch a car is to spend a fortune on television commercials. These typically show a silver car winding its way down a mountainside as a voiceover. And through a list of its features. Mini Cooper was entering a fiercely competitive market, and we knew we couldn't just compete on features. We have to compete on an emotional level.
We have to earn people's respect and trust and really earn jet Even social currency. So prior to launch, we instigated a two part teaser campaign. The first part involved handwriting many 10s of thousands of matchbook messages. The messages that things like you look cool the new excitement and feature the free call member. casually dressed promotional people then went out and hunted these match books to people in clubs and bars. Curiosity would lead people to call the number on the cards.
They knew it wasn't a Selman, but as it was an 800 number, but they wondered what was going on. When they reach the number they had many voice saying, Hi, this has many come and check out my hot body work online at mini co.uk. This could be termed direct response marketing and a touristy poor way to market to people, as often people don't bother to respond. In this instance, 11.5% of the people who received a match book went online. This is a staggering figure for this kind of technique. One afternoon we had access to an actual mini car.
This is quite a rare event, as BMW often don't have cars right up until the day of production. So we took it advantage. We grabbed the camera and took some informal shots of the car. We embedded the website address in post production on the pictures. We then printed many thousands of photographs and put them in these holiday snap wallets. These were typically given to people when they put the film in to get developed.
These photo wallets were ubiquitous at the time. We placed the photo packs in bars and clubs and the backs of cabs and changing rooms of trendy boutiques. When you curiosity would lead people to pick it up and open them thinking the town someone's vacation snaps. Or they discovered photographs of this exciting new car, which hadn't previously been seen by majority of the public. It was gratifying to see people passing these photographs around and talking about them. This is not something you often see with print advertising.
One of the great things about owning a mini is you can park it pretty much anywhere. There was this attribute that led us to the gorilla parking campaign. Not only did it show off this very useful feature, it also highlighted minis cheeky fun and adventurous personality. At the end of the year we wanted to celebrate. So we created the spectacular festive tree made out of the fiberglass minis we've been using for the gorilla parking. The festive tree featured flashing lights and music, and we made it just a little bit too tall for London Bridge.
This meant the authorities to open London Bridge, bringing London to a standstill and creating a spectacular visual for the media. Now let's take a look at what some clients like to call a red thread idea or a big idea. This is an idea which holds together semantically a number of different media channels. So the idea can make sense as a TV spot, or can make sense as an event or as a digital piece. Or as a publicity stunt. Unilever's dove brand approached us and asked us to come up with a theme for a sampling project.
The theme had to extend beyond just a sampling platform and be able to fit into a number of other media channels. A big idea in other words Welcome back to free thinking for sale and this is part two