Good advertising gets people talking. Marketers just need to lodge a thought in overwhelmed consumers’ heads to have a chance. For a litter prevention campaign with partners Hill & Knowlton and Keep America Beautiful, we took things to extremes. Wrong extremes, to frame up how most people perceive littering (it’s wrong, you know). Our outlandish wrongs set up the payoff: LitteringIsWrongToo.org. We even gave folks a place to chime in with their wrongs. And, in the end, we got people thinking about (not) littering. Nothing wrong with that. The campaign also garnered TWO PR industry awards for excellence. Nothing wrong with that, either.
When digital printing first became affordable and accessible, we were asked to tell people it was affordable and accessible. We tasked ourselves with also making it entertaining, lest it be lost in a sea of literature to businesses from printers, caterers, document shredders and office-plant watering services. These preposterously written and designed direct mail pieces compelled a trial of this new printing freedom, asking readers to input their own information on a fun website, which generated a totally customized return postcard within days with the customer’s information woven in. Product demonstration: the oldest trick in the book…modernized.