A Cunning Stunt

Kiwi émigré in London, Tim Ellingham, did not think much of English beer and asked his mates back home in New Zealand to send him some Speight’s, NZ’s best-selling brew.

Learning of this, Speight’s decided to build a proper Kiwi pub and ship it over to the UK so Tim and his Earls Court buddies could have a decent piss-up.
Or, put another way, Publicis Mojo in Auckland wondered if they couldn’t do something a bit more involving than just make another TV commercial.

The story ran around the world of the five volunteers (among the thousands who applied) aboard the MV. Lida, bringing the ale-house to the mother country.
It’s even on the Motor Boats Monthly website, for heaven’s sake!

As the lads made their way from New Zealand to Samoa, on to Panama, the Bahamas, New York and then London, they blogged and vlogged their experiences. And opened up the pub every evening for an hour!

Okay, so it’s what media planners call ‘a stunt’ but a stunt that reached several million TV viewers when it made the news on both sides of the world; a stunt that has spawned a 60-min TV documentary; that was followed daily on national radio; that got people talking; that drove Speight’s back to number one in the market. A stunt that wouldn’t have worked as well without social media.

The point is, it’s not easy to place messages in social media, but if an idea is intriguing enough, it’s where it gathers momentum through wob. (Word of blog.)

However, before we assume this is yet another death knell for TV advertising, the news in the UK is that spending on TV advertising is up. The good old-fashioned commercial still remains the single most important way to reach mass audiences.

Even though they are selling a console game, Halo 3, Microsoft used trad media to launch the game on September 12th last year.

The campaign won the Grand Prix at the Clios this year and more awards are coming.


/Patrick Collister/