Stolen Phone Tour

Background

There are many sources for people to find things to see and do in Shanghai but Time Out goes deeper than others, to reveal the hidden gems of the city. The challenge was to demonstrate this in a meaningful, attention-getting way. Doing so would help differentiate Time Out Shanghai, increasing its readers and users and making it more attractive to advertisers.

Idea

To promote the local version of the magazine, Time Out deliberately ‘lost’ its company mobile phone, leaving it on a random street in Shanghai for someone to pick it up.

When a passerby did pick it up they received a text message. Get in the London cab that just pulled up.

The cab, a nod to Time Out’s London roots, carried the phone snatchers around the city to places they would never have found on their own. The only communication was through text messages on the mobile phone.

Along the way, hidden cameras picked up the reactions as the subject (and friends) went to Homies, a tiny American-style hole in the wall, for breakfast; a sidestreet store where the owner showed old movies; UltraViolet, an unmarked restaurant where each course was served with customised wall projections, scents and soundtracks; the Peace Hotel Jazz Bar, where jazz music first came to Communist China, and where the same band (now in their 80s) plays weekly; Shouning Lu, a street food market favoured by locals; and a private table at Bar Rouge, one of Shanghai’s most exclusive nightclubs along the Bund. 

Results

The campaign has only been running a couple of weeks and no results have been collated. However, there are plans to launch Stolen Phone tours in other cities. 

Our Thoughts

This is a good old-fashioned demo ad but made fit for 2013. See for yourself how Time Out shows you the hidden treasures of the city you thought you knew. As yet the video doesn’t seem to have had too many views yet (5,195) but early days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiVePfOOzGM

It is designed for talkability, to get people sharing the link to Time Out’s homepage and/or Facebook page for no other reason than it’s a nice idea. Elsewhere in Directory I’ve talked about real-time advertising. This is real-life advertising, when you watch ordinary people caught up in a stunt.

It belongs to a new genre of Candid Camera ads, which include Heineken’s ‘The Candidate’ and pretty much everything Duval Guillaume have done in the last two years including the Febelfin campaign on pages 52-53.

Anyway, we liked it.