Take me. Read me. Leave me.
Issue 13 | December 2009
Agency
BMF, Sydney
Creative Team
Creative Director: Dylan Taylor Digital Creative Director: Fred Haas Copywriter: Keith Cox Art Director: JJ Winlove
Production Team
Digital Producer: Josh Akmens Interactive Designer: Michael Widgery Technical Lead: Daniel Christos
Other Credits
Digital Planning Director: Aaron Michie Group Account Director: Sasha Firth Account Director: Rebecca Morton Account Manager: Astrid Jones
Date
From 6th July 2009
Background
There are an estimated 2.6 million people in Australia with vision problems who haven’t taken an eye test. One of the first things people notice when their eyesight deteriorates is that they start to have difficulty with everyday reading. Yet, many are reluctant to do anything about it.
This presented a great opportunity for OPSM, Australia’s leading eye-care brand, to engage with this audience and become the brand of choice for eye tests.
Idea
The campaign centred around a book tracker concept, designed to enable people to share their love of books and celebrate the joy of the written word.
Working with publisher Random House, the agency procured 4,000 free books across 17 titles for the program they called “Take me. Read me. Leave me.”
The books were handed out in cities around the country. They were left in cafes, gyms, hairdressers and OPSM stores.
Stickers inside the books directed readers to a dedicated website where they could enter a unique code and report where they’d picked the book up and where they’d left it.
In other words, they could follow the book’s journey online.
A Facebook fan page was also created to build a community of readers and encourage people to comment on their experience.
Results
Books have made their way all around Australia – from Tasmania to Cairns – and been left in places as far flung as New York, Bali and Cambodia.
The response has been universally positive.
Our Thoughts
For the last one hundred years, advertising has been B to C. Now, all of a sudden it is C to C as well. The trick for agencies is to come up with ‘momentum ideas’, that is to say ideas which people want to share with each other in growing numbers. For clients, the scary part of all this is that you can’t ever predict where your idea is likely to take you. Here’s a company which makes spectacles getting into bed with a book publisher, encouraging people to read some good books (‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, ‘Catch-22’, ‘The Time-Traveller’s Wife’ etc etc) Whatever children they have, they will be interesting.