Lab Mice
Fantastic Delites
Issue 26 | March 2013
Agency
Clemenger BBDO Adelaide
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Karl Fleet Creative Team: Matt O’Grady, Oliver Prenton Director: Erik de Roos Agency Producer: Holly Horne Head of Digital: Christian Russell Social Media Manager: Alister Robertson
Production Team
Production Company: Anifex Director: Richard Chataway Producer: Courtney Bartley Editor: Jon Holmes Sound: Matt McKenzie-Smith
Other Credits
Client: Fantastic Snacks Chief Marketing Officer: Michael Neale Category Brand Manager: Michele Lok, Sally Huefner
Date
December 2012
Background
Fantastic Delites is an Australian brand of rice-based snacks.
In 2012 the company ran a successful promotion setting up a vending machine in Melbourne’s Southern Cross station inviting people to perform various tasks in return for a free bag of the snacks.
Idea
To launch the new flavour variant of Vintage Cheddar and Red Onion, members of the public were invited to become laboratory mice in an experiment to see how far they would go for a free pack.
In the experiment, people were invited to dress in mouse costumes and start spinning a giant exercise wheel inside a cage. Only when they built up sufficient speed would the Delite-o-Matic machine release the free reward. .
The stunt took place in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall in December and resulted in numerous thrills and spills as participants made desperate efforts to score a free pack.
“At the conclusion of the first video, we made a promise that we would return and find out if we could push people to even further extremes”, said Karl Fleet, Executive Creative Director, Clemenger BBDO Adelaide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvXnYNexc7w
Results
To date the original viral video has been viewed 2.6 million times on YouTube. In the first month since going live, the Lab Mice have been viewed 260,000 times.
Our Thoughts
There has been some debate about this in various blogs around adland. There is a view that the “What would you do for a…” route is hardly new and even the human-interacting-with-vending-machine schtick is now a tried and trusted advertising approach with the smile-recognition ice-cream machine made for Unilever by SapientNitro, Coca-Cola’s Friendship Machine from Ogilvy Argentina and Jello’s not-for-kids machine from Crispin Porter.
But so what? This had us squeaking with laughter at Directory. I think the reason it works is because the human victims are in thrall to a machine. If it was a person making them run themselves ragged, it would be unpleasant.
Follow-ups are rarely as successful as the originals and this doesn’t seem to have attracted the same sort of number of online views, which is a pity, because getting people to dress like and behave like mice is funnier.