My shots Monday: Live Stuntvertising
A round-up of the best public advertising stunts is the subject of this week’s My shots playlist.
Tonight, two creative co-workers from creative agency Music will pair up for an attempt to break the world record for the longest hug at Manchester’s Piccadilly Station to support and raise funds and awareness for National Carers Week (which runs from 9-15 June).
The attempt is set to make for an entertaining watch and the duo will be required to lock bodies for a gruelling 27 hours if they are to be successful in their mission for Manchester Carers Centre. In the meantime, we’ve curated a selection of our favourite executions unleashed on the unsuspecting public, including more train station antics and entertaining surprises.
Liverpool Street Station in East London, like most, is hardly known as a centre for amusement but back in 2009 T-Mobile teamed up with agency Saatchi & Saatchi London to deliver a unique song and dance to commuters that saw that change. At 11am on a Thursday morning in January, 350 people broke into a choreographed dance routine to a mix of iconic pop music as passers-by looked on in surprise. The next night, a video of the stunt was aired during Celebrity Big Brother’s ad break on Channel 4. The ad earned much media attention and was the first of a string of similar executions for the brand.
Having continued its foray into live stunt advertising with other music themed events at Trafalgar Square and Heathrow Terminal 5, it was two years after the Liverpool Street takeover that the brand returned with another execution that shifted the focus to the British driving community. Hitting various cities up and down the country, including Newcastle and London, fake traffic wardens targeted parked cars to deliver what looked like penalty tickets to drivers much to their annoyance. Upon opening the envelopes however, it soon became clear that what they had been handed was actually cold hard cash all in the name of the brand’s ‘Life is for Sharing’ tagline.
Agency Duval Gillaume Modem gave us more surprising scenes on the streets as it placed a big red button “somewhere in a little town in Belgium” which, when pressed, would activate all sorts of chaos and calamity. The drama in the resulting video footage includes ambulances, bicycles, crashes, fights and police shootouts and it was all brilliantly staged to promote a drama segment on TV channel TNT.
In the same year French agency Marcel joined forces with digital production outfit Fighting Fish to deliver a unique live experience for French mineral water brand Contex. The execution placed a row of exercise bikes in front of a building in Paris and invited women to start pedalling to see what happened. Before they know it, they were powering a unique audio-visual installation that saw a stripper dancing to a Shania Twain soundtrack. The event was created to promote fun fitness and the brand was also behind a fireman-themed follow-up campaign.
More recently London-based creative agency Dare got spontaneous on the street with an attention-grabbing film for UK charity Mankind. Honing in on the fact that there are more male victims of domestic violence than you may think, the film plays out two similar scenarios with very different reactions from the public communicated by hidden cameras.
The campaign highlights that the live medium can be harnessed not just only for entertainment value, but to educate on genuine social attitudes and behaviour. In the past year, it has also been used successfully to promote movies and TV including the latest title from the Carrie horror franchise, Devil’s Due and The Walking Dead.
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