Marketing Books Invitations
BBDO & Microsoft
Issue 31 | June 2014
Agency
BBDO Brussels
Creative Team
Art Director Klaartje Galle Copywriter Re´gine Smetz Leen Baeten Creative Director Henny van Gerwen Sebastien De Valck
Production Team
Printer Jozias Boone
Other Credits
Account Team BBDO Daniel Schots Sarah Van Praag Account Microsoft Tim Nagels
Date
February 2014
Background
BBDO & Microsoft wanted to make marketers aware of the fact they needed to catch up with the digital revolution and with new technologies which their customers had already fully embraced. They wanted marketers to come to BBDO Connect, a seminar designed to educate and inspire them with the possibilities.
Idea
The idea started with the insight that if marketers were not using new technologies it was because their outdated marketing handbooks did not discuss them.
So what was the point of keeping those old books if they were so useless?
2,000 pages of old marketing textbooks were ripped out and each was overprinted with an invitation to innovation. Each mailing comprised two pages from a forgotten book, making it clear there were new technologies and new ideas to be discovered at the BBDO Connect event.
Results
No fewer than 311 of Belgium's leading marketers registered for BBDO Connect. A 30% increase in response compared to other BBDO seminar invitations. Now let's hope these marketers will integrate more technology in their future campaigns.
Our Thoughts
It’s because we still hold books to be of symbolic value that the wanton destruction of them is shocking. To set out to shred a book as BBDO did seems not just uncivilised but an attack on knowledge itself. And that is what makes this a particularly powerful piece of communication. Because, when you pause to think, it’s nonsense to imagine that all books are valuable.
The pace of change today is at the slowest it will be for the rest of your lifetime. The old rules of marketing have been completely superseded and it is true to say that most consumers are further ahead of the curve than the marketers trying to talk to them. This is quite a complicated story to tell but this invitation does it with deceptive simplicity.
Will it win awards? I doubt it. Sadly, great work always looks too obvious.