Heads Up: Make it (not) easy
I was amused this week to see a trending video that showed a pizza store's ‘guerilla’ marketing. There’s nothing high-brow here, no major brand or work from the canon of marketing history. Instead, we’re in Atlanta, Georgia looking at a deceptively simple and effective campaign by a local food store, Glide Pizza.
“Scan if you can”
The Brief: How many times have you dodged someone in the street trying to give you a leaflet? Or been handed a leaflet with some free offer to claim something? Many times I bet, and rarely with much interest from you. Glide Pizza wanted to generate a buzz about their pizza store, give out some free slices and catch people’s attention.
The Campaign: ‘Scan if you can’ is Glide Pizza’s amusing, silly and eye-catching stunt that not only had immediate impact, but got them a large online response too. The campaign is simple. Send one person out in a branded ‘morph’ suit and a box on their head displaying a huge QR code for free pizza, but rather than stand looking bored handing out flyers - RUN.
This hilarious video is a genius reversal of the norm. Instead of trying to pull attention and hope to be of interest to people, they make themselves illusive, leveraging scarcity bias and making an engagement with them something to be won and celebrated. By choosing a boisterous and silly way of attempting to tease people into intrigue, they create a challenge to be won. Imagine if people not only wanted to engage with your brand, but actively chased you down the street for it!
Not only was it a triumph for the Pizza Store locally, but it also gained them an international audience with their campaign video amassing 45,000 likes. Not bad for one person running around in yellow spandex.
Why does it stand out?
➡ It’s silly and eye-catching
➡ ️It’s flips the norm to make you want to engage with them (not the other way around)
➡ ️It’s super cheap to create, the value is in the creative idea
➡ ️It’s self-aware and comically ‘shabby’ with the hand painted ‘scan if you can’ sign
In the EAST campaign model that was produced by the UK Government Behavioural Science Unit (Make campaigns: Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely), we’re taught to make engagement with campaigns easy. This campaign, in a sense, did the exact opposite and that made all the difference.
Heads Up Challenge: Think where can we apply friction for a positive gain?
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
What would be your version of making something scarce, more desirable and maybe, a little bit silly?
Your Brief:
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Set aside a weekly 15 minute slot to complete these weekly creative tasks and why not schedule a call with others on your team to talk through your thoughts on this topic and share ideas for you to try out?
Heads Up is a weekly creative digest that encourages animal advocates to take inspiration from case studies of creative campaign tactics outside of our movement.
> ~ 5 minutes read-time (but hopefully gets you thinking for longer than that)
> Demonstrates interesting tactics and use of biases that you can test
> Contains a creative challenge for you to explore independently or with your team with results that you can apply for your important campaigning work
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