Brands don’t live forever. It’s a matter of marketing. The challenge is to maintain market positioning by staying relevant and to do so, brands sometimes need to renew or even reinvent themselves.
Scribe is a traditional stationery company from Mexico and its recent #ScribeBillboard campaign is a perfect example of such. With a track record of over 130 years, Scribe knew it was time for a change, time to approach a younger audience. To do so, a new brand concept was created to better engage with the new audience, inspire them and grant them with a true experience.
The concept was created by the Viva! and Doblevida advertising agencies in Mexico and was launched with an original interactive billboard campaign called #ScribeBillborad.
The campaign, combining offline and online advertising, was based on a huge canvas billboard in the heart of Mexico City. But this was no regular billboard – it housed a local artist, Cecilia Beaven, for 10 whole days. The artist lived in a special room built behind the billboard and painted the billboard, day by day, based entirely on ideas and inspirations she received from Scribe followers on twitter.
The campaign was heavily supported online, leveraged to the maximum by a flow of content – text, video and images. A designated blog was created offering daily webisodes following the artists and her paintings, exclusive images and stories were shared. Social Media played an important role in the campaign for both generating customer involvement, dialog, maintaining momentum and documenting Cecilia’s progress. A live streaming broadcasted from the billboard was also offered and many YouTube videos uploaded to the Scribe channel.
Juan Pablo Manazza, General Creative Director at the Viva! Agency and the man behind the idea, explained how a buzz was created prior to #ScribeBillboard: “ We started with a teaser campaign that included white billboards all around the city, in representation of the space that Cecilia was going to paint and announcements on Scribe’s Twitter and Facebook.”
During the event, the billboard attracted local celebrities, musicians, curious passersby and the famous Moltov band even played live for Cecilia. The campaign quickly attracted the eyes of the media too and gained much exposure among blogs and traditional press (national and international). Replica billboards were plastered across the city as the main one was being painted and promotions appeared on TV and cinema screens.
Campaign results were impressive, particularly online. Juan believes the campaign’s high level of engagement is what made it so successful: “People really got engaged with our action, they wanted to be part of this amazing collective piece of art so they kept tweeting asking for drawings, turning themselves into human antennas broadcasting our campaign.”
Engagement may have been the key to this campaign although it would not have been so successful without the content supporting billboard story. The content created by the brand kept the story alive and the conversation going on social media.
The #ScribeBillboard campaign can be a lesson to brands on the importance and beauty of engagement, the power of original and compelling content and the effectiveness in utilizing social media to the maximum to create a real experience.
Juan: “The best ideas are the ones that connect with people’s emotions. While everybody is talking about content, for us the content is the queen but engagement is the king.”
Credits:
Advertising Agency: La Agencia Viva! & La Doblevida – Ciudad de México – México
General Creative Director: Juan Pablo Manazza & Manuel Camacho
Art Director: Roberto Flores/ Xavier Fajardo/ Ivan Mayorquín
Copywriter: Eduardo García/ Carlos Perez
Account Services Director: Miguel Mendiola
Project Leader: Claudia Caballero
Illustrator: Cecilia Beaven (Billboard Artist)
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