Weltvereinigung.de: polystyrene stencils

Realisation on bridges by German light artist Oliver Bienkowski. These polystyrene stencils advertise in 14 cities of Germany for weltvereinigung.de.

Hopenhagen Sunbathing Flash Mob

TBWA getting aggressive with Saatchi

Grocery Store Musical

Song by Anthony King and Scott Brown (Gutenberg! The Musical!)

For our latest mission, six undercover actors burst into song in a grocery store in Queens. Three minutes and lots of silly choreography later, they returned to their roles as shoppers and stock boys. The mission was filmed with hidden robotic, lipstick, and wearable cameras. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our report below.

We had a couple of really excellent hidden camera reaction interviews that got cut from the final video. I put them together in an outtake video:

Produced by: Disposable Television
Director of Photography: TV Boy
Still Photos: Katie Sokoler

We’ve been wanting to stage a follow up to our Food Court Musical mission for quite some time. Unfortunately, we’re not able to produce a musical like that without some serious help in the budget department. (Food Court Musical was produced for a TV pilot.) Last month Trident Layers expressed interest in sponsoring an Improv Everywhere event (giving us creative control and using no product placement), and I knew this would be a great opportunity to create a new public musical.

Agent Brown rehearses with Agents Kayne and Rustin

I knew from the start that in order to make a worthy follow up to Food Court Musical, I would have to use the same songwriting team, Scott Brown & Anthony King. Not only are they longtime Improv Everywhere Agents, they’re also the authors of the hit Off-Broadway musical, Gutenberg! The Musical!. Their songs, both catchy and hilarious, have been stuck in my head for many a sleepless night.

The cast rehearsing

The cast were all actors I knew from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. We had to cast people who could really sing well, given the “slow jam” nature of the song. We had a rehearsal at a Manhattan studio where Agent Brown taught them the song, and Agent King worked on the choreography.

Rehearsing in the store

The next night we had a rehearsal in the grocery store itself. The store was part of a small chain called “Best Yet” and was located in Astoria, Queens. We chose it for its enormous size, at least by New York standards.

Our rehearsal was late at night, right before the store closed. There were very few people shopping at that hour, so we wouldn’t get a real sense of how crowded the produce section would be until the actual mission the next day. We worked with the store and got permission, enabling us to set up hidden cameras. We used some incredible robotic cameras that were operated via joystick in the control room in the back.

The control room

Speakers

We had planned to just use the store’s PA system to play the song. At the dress rehearsal we learned that grocery store speakers sound awful when the volume gets cranked up. The bass turned to fuzz. So we hid some additional speakers under the muffin table to give their system a boost.

In addition to the robotic cameras hidden on high ledges and in security domes, Agent Adams had a couple of camera rigs he could control out on the floor. We put a lipstick camera on the end of a cart and filled it with groceries. He was able to push it around the area while watching what he was filming on a little monitor.

Agent Adams also had a hidden camera in the strap of his bag, getting a great POV shot of anyone he talked to.

His main job was to get reactions from shoppers after the musical ended. He wore a hidden microphone and also wore an earpiece, enabling me to talk to him from the control room and say things like, “Try to get the woman you’re talking to to turn around; we’re only seeing the back of her head.”

Control room monitor

We staged the mission a few times throughout the day to make sure we got the best possible take and camera coverage. The first take started around 1 PM.

The first few moments were always hilarious. As soon as Agent Kayne started in with his “No, no, no’s,” heads began to turn.

When we did Food Court Musical, we had a pretty good idea of where our audience would be– sitting at the tables. This was more unpredictable. We had all of this choreography planned, but we had no idea if people would make way for us. The area got increasingly crowded as the day went on, which made it all the more fun. Often people found themselves right in the middle of the show.

A woman laughs as Agent Johnson passes with his basket

The woman above took her cart right through the center just as the chorus began. It was like she was a part of the choreography.

Agent Scott’s character was pregnant; she was not. We used a fake belly. She had shoppers coming up to her before and after the song asking when she was due, etc.

Agent Fernandez helps a customer find an item from the circular

Agents Brown and Fernandez played the two stock boy characters. This meant they spent most of the day walking around the floor in the store’s uniform. Of course they were constantly being stopped by customers asking for help.

Our musical was staged very close to the front door, so lots of folks would walk in mid-song. It was fun to see their reactions as they entered and were immediately confronted by our ridiculousness. We got so many wonderful reactions from everyone in the store throughout the afternoon. Queens is the most diverse county in the entire world, and it was really wonderful seeing all of the different types of people laugh and smile.

Letting a friend on the phone listen in

This guy was particularly excited (as seen in the video)

There was always a nice crowd near the registers looking over

The musical got even more absurd when Agent Brown carted Agent Fernandez down the aisle. Agent Fernandez delivered his passionate speech into a price gun, and the two starting spinning while the rest of the cast circled them, building up to the finale.

Before the shoppers could finish applauding, our actors were back to normal life. Those playing customers went back to shopping and those playing stock boys got back to work.

Agent Brown prices some fruit

Mission Accomplished

Via

Playstation 3 Slim EGG [case study]

FREEBORD: STREET ILLUMINATI

Crew of Freeborders take over an SF street to create a real life video game. http://www.freebord.com.

Saugrippe.com::: Campaign against swine influenza.

Agency: barfuss.creative.group


A stunt campaign against swine influenca. With this promotion they pull attention to contagiosity at Oktoberfest. 

Head & Shoulders “THE COOL ZONE” Brand activation, Jeddah

• Brand: Head & Shoulders
• Brand Owner: P&G.
• Category: Health and Beauty.
• (BTL ) strategy, event planning & fulfillment:Brand Commandos.
• Region: KSA, Jeddah.
• Date: 12.8.2009.
• Objective: P&G aim was to build strong brand awareness and encourage consumer trial initiatives.
• Solution: Brand Commandos helped P&G distribute sample kits and establish a strong presence among Jeddah community.
• Results: 4000 sample distribution.

Guerilla Event Marketing—A Mob in a Flash

The choreographed dance, not surprisingly, was captured on film. Spontaneous shimmying spurred on by commuting ennui? Not quite. The event was a brand-orchestrated flash mob, a gathering (usually precipitated by an elaborate set of e-mail instructions) of large numbers of people in a public place, where some preplanned event takes place to entertain, amuse or generate buzz and publicity for a well-known brand (in this case, T-Mobile). The mobile-phone company pulled off a similar Trafalgar Square sing-along three months later, attracting nearly 14,000 people. T-Mobile isn’t the only company to employ viral marketing using a colossal street cast and the Internet to build brand awareness. One hundred leotard-clad young women danced in Piccadilly Circus to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” for Trident Unwrapped. And sunglass giant Ray-Ban staged its own guerrilla-marketing ploy in Manhattan, with “street teams” (decked out in Ray-Ban shades, naturally) standing and gazing skyward at a huge Ray-Ban building wrap. Some companies have even merged their performing plebes with some high-profile talent. SKY HDTV commissioned supermodel Gisele Bündchen to flip through the TV channels in an airport lounge while more than 1,000 cast members “brought the TV to life.” And a clothing store on California’s Sunset Boulevard was suddenly overrun by hundreds of dancers wearing gold parachute pants and cutting a rug to “You Can’t Touch This” (an A&E mobile-marketing ploy to attract attention to its Hammertime documentary about rapper MC Hammer). This viral marketing is a form of guerrilla advertising that not only directly touches its participants and the spectators who witness the event live, but also the viewership that subsequently gets a chance to view the event via e-mail, text messaging, podcasts, blogs, forums, social networking sites and other Internet resources. You know the drill: Your brother sends you a link to some YouTube video or Facebook group, and voilà—instant brand awareness that spreads like a California wildfire. There are even websites dedicated to helping brands track how well their viral campaigns are doing. Visible Measures, for instance, offers a Viral Reach Database that collects data from more than 150 video-sharing destinations. It then generates stats on not only how many people have seen a video campaign (and how many times), but also on how they’ve interacted with it via comments, ratings and their own video responses. Married to the Mob The flash mob is said to have originated in 2003 with Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. For his first successful flash-mob attempt, Wasik blasted out a detailed instructional e-mail to a bunch of people. More than 100 willing participants then converged on the rug department at the flagship Macy’s store in Manhattan, where they gathered around a carpet and informed the salespeople that they all lived together in a warehouse and needed to search for a “love rug” as a group. Just as weird as their arrival was their sudden departure—after a burst of synchronized clapping, all the participants ran out of the building. “I really just did them as a sort of social experiment,” says Wasik, whose book And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture debuted in June. “I wanted to see what would happen—how far would the e-mail spread? How many people would come? I had seen e-mails and webpages go viral, and I was really interested to see if I could make something like that happen myself.” The fact that companies have tapped into flash-mob types of viral marketing to promote their brands doesn’t surprise Wasik. “It’s an image that captures what people find so exciting about the current information age: a group of strangers using technology to come together instantaneously,” he says. “It makes technology seem like the cure for loneliness and alienation. Of course, the irony is that sometimes our technology has the opposite effect: It lets us connect with more people, but at the expense of the depth of connection.” Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere (a comedic performance-art group that proudly states on its site that it “causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places”) and author of the recently penned Causing a Scene: Extraordinary Pranks in Ordinary Places with Improv Everywhere, isn’t surprised that some companies are using the flash-mob technique to promote their brands (Improv Everywhere itself doesn’t stage events that advertise specific brands). “Anything that’s popular will eventually be co-opted by the advertising world,” Todd explains. “It’s usually just a matter of time. Brands see people getting excited about something, and their first thought is always, ‘How can we use this [phenomenon] to get people excited for our brand?’”
	What Works, What Doesn’t For such a public-event-driven campaign to work, you need to keep the element of surprise without alienating your audience—or your participants. “I think a mistake many brands make is not being transparent,” Todd says. “No one wants to show up to a flash-mob-type of event only to find out later on they were used as pawns in a marketing campaign. If you’re making a commercial for the Web, don’t kid yourself or anyone else involved that it’s anything else.” Wasik agrees. “I suspect that flash-mob marketing will be more effective for [companies like] T-Mobile as an image in advertisements (where it gives that sense of instant togetherness) than it is as an actual viral campaign (i.e., creating mobs that try to market to participants),” he says. “People don’t want to feel like they’re shills in a corporate campaign, and once they realize that’s what you’re asking them to be, they won’t show up.” Brands also have to weigh the risks in attracting participating players. “You look stupid if no one shows up,” Wasik explains. “But if you try to solve the problem by sweetening the deal somehow (book some attraction like a celebrity or band, for example, or give something free away), then you risk having people show up and cause problems. There have been almost no cases of ‘real’ flash mobs leading to violence or arrests, in part because the absurdity of the idea filters out the kinds of people who would start trouble.” The psychology behind why flash mobs and viral campaigns work speaks to an individual’s inherent need to create—and connect. “I think people are excited about creating their own entertainment,” Todd says. And participating in an Improv Everywhere type of mission is an active form of entertainment: “You’re creating something with a group, rather than passively watching a movie, TV show, or sporting event,” Todd adds. Wasik warns that brands can’t rely solely on these manufactured free-for-alls and their viral nature. “It speaks to our great dream about the Internet, and about technology in general—that it will cure our alienation and allow us to feel connected,” he says. “And sometimes it does. But other times it makes us just feel distracted and stretched thin—keeping up with 400 Facebook friends but never really feeling connected to them.” In the end, even campaigns that thrive in the age of computers need to still rely on good old-fashioned human relationships. “It’s a matter of really thinking through what makes people press that ‘forward’ button,” Wasik says. “Jonah Peretti, a really smart thinker on viral phenomena who I profile in my book, says that things that go viral have a ‘social hook’—they speak to the specific relationships that we have with people in our lives. If you have friends you talk to about politics, you’ll send them viral media about politics; if you talk to them about dating, you’ll send them viral media about dating. We use these Internet memes as extensions of our conversations.”
	Jennifer Gidman lives and works in New York.