Creative Grower’s Association South West
Imagine for a moment that you are the Inward Investment Manager for the South West Regional Development Agency. You have been tasked with attracting new advertising and creative agencies, work and staff to the region by raising awareness of the South West’s creative industry credentials. In practice, this means poaching a lot of folk from the smoke. Not easy. So how would you set about achieving this challenging task?
The standard approach is to play safe with a ‘fresh air and lovely place to work’ themed TV ad. But that’s expensive, it’s been done before and it won’t convince anyone in Hoxton that there is anything other than a creative desert out beyond Soho, never mind Swindon.
On the other hand you could get creative yourself and launch a quirky, black humour viral, aimed straight at your target audience. A viral that will make them think, ‘wow if they have a creative community with ideas as strong as this, it might really be worth relocating’. It appeals directly to the sort of creative individuals, and companies, the RDA would ideally love to attract. It’s a much stronger proposition than the default safe approach – the ‘tourist information travelogue’ with its redundant adjective style of copywriting. ‘Fountains falling in moist cascades’ – get the picture?
The campaign was planned, produced and seeded by Bristol-based viral agency Rubber Republic and has since become an internet hit.
‘The Harvest’: Creatives Grow Better in the South West’, is a short comedy film revealing how and why creativity is so strong in the region. After filming it was ‘blog posted’ on some of the UK’s, London’s and the World’s top creative blogs. The film reached its intended audience effectively, and has since been broadcast on TV, and featured in cinemas and public display screens in the South West region. That’s how viral works.
In addition the film was backed by a microsite at www.creativejuices.org.uk and an offline PR campaign in which bottles of cider (bearing a link to the microsite URL) were distributed to top creative agencies in London. The film has attracted over 180,000 views to date, with 50,000 views coming in the first three weeks of the campaign.
Maybe there is a business segment, or niche market you would like to attract. The more specific and switched on the audience, the better viral marketing will work in reaching them – and because it is viral it will spread to a network of contacts and friends, giving more bang for your buck.
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