CATEOGORY: E-mail Marketing
FIRST PLACE: NEW MEDIA & SECOND PLACE: INTEGRATED PROMOTION: Blurb’s Killed Ideas
AGENCY: Isobar
CLIENT: Blurb Inc.
Blurb attracts agency creative directors by publishing their one great idea that got away
Every agency creative director has a drawer full of great ideas that the client didn’t fall in love with. Blurb, a print-on-demand book publisher, decided to give those ideas some legs by publishing the 50 best in a book called “Killed Ideas”.
The point of the campaign was to lift the brand through a heavy amount of buzz, social networking, involvement and conversation. They succeeded. “We saw ‘killed ideas’ as an indicator of unabashed and unrestrained creativity,” said Andrew Strickman, senior vice president and account director at Isobar. “That is what Blurb as a brand stands for and that’s how we came up with the idea of celebrating those ideas that hadn’t seen the light of day.”
Through planning discussions, they determined that a social environment would be crucial to the success of the campaign. Isobar identified roughly 300 bloggers who were leaders in advertising thinking and creativity and reached out to them in a personalized and individual way.
“We offered them the ability to run their own contests around Killed Ideas with vouchers for Blurb books as prizes,” Strickman said. “A lot of them thought it was a great idea and wanted to promote it.”
They also launched a Killed Ideas Twitter feed centering on building an environment where creativity, advertising and design could be discussed in all of its forms.
“Our ‘follow’ strategy was very directed,” Strickman says. “We had a set of criteria by which we would identify and follow someone valuable to this conversation and we amassed a following of 1,800 of the most influential and engaged commentators on creativity. It was a highly focused strategy and it really paid off. Not only had we followed the right people, but in exchange, they were following us for the same reasons.”
In choosing a curator for the book, they looked for someone with recognition and credibility in advertising and chose Adrants blogger Steve Hall.
“His blog is the single most read and subscribed-to blog about the advertising industry on the Web,” Strickman said. “He has a reputation for being caustic and a gadfly and a button pusher. We knew he would be a terrific curator. He also blogged about the book and the ideas being submitted, so he was a great ambassador for the project.”
To help facilitate buzz and conversation, ‘operatives’ were placed on the ground in leading agency markets — San Francisco, London, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Tasked with spreading the word to their own networks as well as within the advertising communities, they passed out cards and small premiums in agency hangouts and even went so far as to leave Post-It notes in bar restrooms.
The campaign also served as an exercise in improving Blurb’s processes.
“One of the biggest complaints they heard from the agency/design world was that they were forced to use Blurb’s proprietary software,” Strickman said. So Blurb launched a new product called ‘PDF to Book’ which gave designers the opportunity to design in whatever program they were most used to and then exporting and uploading a PDF to Blurb’s print facility. It was a great time for this campaign and this Killed Ideas book to come out because it gave them the opportunity to promote their new product as well.”
This brand and product awareness campaign generated 250 killed ideas from 31 countries, representing 170 brands. More than 1,900 followers kept in touch with the campaign via Twitter and consistently re-tweeted Blurb’s postings, both about the campaign and about the creativity topics that were being discussed. More than 11% of people who went to http://www.killedideas.com also clicked through to http://www.blurb.com.
Overall, the campaign generated 834,000 impressions, including 300,000 blog postings, 184,000 social media impressions and 150,000 word-of-mouth impressions from operatives’ face-to-face meetings.
In addition, the buzz for this campaign — and ultimately the brand — spread around the world. The most telling story came from Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins who was talking to a company in South Africa for whom she sits on their board and overheard someone having a ‘water cooler’ conversation about the Killed Ideas promotion.
“That demonstrates the power of word of mouth and knowing exactly who your target is, how to speak to them and where to find them,” Strickman said. —Lynn Russo Whylly
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