“Gentleman, we have run out of money; now we have to think”, so goes the quote attributed to Winston Churchill, and I think it’s an apt saying that applies to creative PR ideas. When you’ve got very limited budget, you need to really think.
Despite the teen vampire movie Twilight being the biggest theatrical release of the year when it came to launching the DVD for client E:One, we had a couple of thousands pounds expense budget for the entire campaign. I’ve always tried to put products at the heart of product launches, not least as it’s one thing we don’t have to pay for, so I challenged the team to make the physical DVD the story – so we could literally deliver the line: “to mark the launch of…”
The brainstorm threw up the predictable vampire-cliches including blood, bats and bites, which was the starting point. DVDs in blood? Bit gruesome; DVDs delivered by bats? Not sure it’s possible and didn’t want PETA on us for animal cruelty; DVDs auto-bitten instead of autographed? That’s the one, brilliant. Simple, low-cost, and easy to activate – we’d send a bunch of DVDs to the teen star Robert Pattinson, and he’d simply bite them, rather than sign them. The stunt could be released as a news and picture story as well as using the DVDs for competition prizes with fan forums, etc. The client loved it.
But as anyone who works in PR knows; nothing is simple. Pattinson wasn’t available and the US studio refused to put in a request for his time. The client asked us to go back to the drawing board, but I’ve learned over the years that good ideas are scarce to come by so before you think afresh, think whether you can creatively overcome the sticking point. John Webster, the BMP ad legend responsible for the Honey Monster, Smash Martians and the amazing The Guardian: Points of View ad, was the master of this. He went to every consumer focus group and listened intently to the feedback; not to change the creative idea, but to improve it. Perhaps most famously, a focus group of mums thought his original ‘little monster’ character for Sugar Puffs would be too scary for their kids, but instead of scrapping the idea, he simply made the monster massive, clumsy and, as a result, loveable. The Honey Monster was born. A campaign character that ran and ran. (There’s an excellent documentary, John Webster: The Human Ad Man, that’s worth watching).
Anyway, taking inspiration from Webster and with the proverb, “necessity is the Mother of invention” ringing in my ears, I worked with the brilliant Ben Brooks-Dutton (now a creative planner at Freuds), to work out how to get Robert Pattinson’s bite marks without actually needing him to do the biting. With a £500 budget. The idea hit us that we’d use the numerous pictures of him smiling (or not smiling) on the internet to simply create a mould of his teeth. My first call was, as ever, to the amazing Brian Dowling at Helix3D, who can make anything.
“Brian, if we got you some close-up pictures of Robert Pattinson’s teeth do you think you could make a machine than would Autobite DVDs?”, I asked. “Sounds simple enough”, was the immediate reply. Days later an Autobite contraption arrived in the office, which could puncture perfect bite-marks through just about any surface. I’m not sure the teeth marks were exactly the shape of Robert Pattinson’s, but I figured that no-one could prove us wrong and the intrigue was good for the story.
One hundred DVDs were Autobitten and given to HMV to flog at their special midnight opening, but not before Ben got the images and words spreading like wildfire through fan forums, teen mags and in national newspapers.
Twilight was the biggest-selling DVD of the year and we ended up launching all the subsequent films and DVDs – spawning ideas like apple-vertising and eye-vertising (it was obviously our ‘vertising’-period!).
So if at first your idea hits a problem, don’t give up, stick with it and challenge yourself to creatively overcome the obstacle.
A load of old Barnum. 