Build your career
IPA 44 Club
Issue 25 | December 2012
Agency
Leo Burnett London
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Justin Tindall Copywriter: Ben Gough Art Director: Ben Gough
Production Team
Photographer: Adrian Burke Retoucher: Florian Hess
Date
May 2012
Background
The IPA 44 Club is a professional advertising body in the UK that arrange talks for young people starting in advertising by some of the biggest names in adland. Awareness of the 44 Club was low as, indeed, was the budget. Emails were being ignored and traditional media in trade publications was too expensive.
Idea
To highlight the fact that the IPA 44 Club gives youngsters access to famous adlanders, Leo Burnett made previous speakers out of Lego, created using only genuine Lego parts. Under the idea of ‘Build Your Career’, the miniature sets packaged in deliberately retro boxes were sent to HR managers (whose budgets usually paid for the tickets to 44 Club events). Postcards of the sets were sent to young people in ad agencies. Each one came with it’s own accessories too. From Sir Martin Sorrell’s ‘multi-millions’ to Graham Fink’s ‘shed-load of awards’, there were seven in all to collect.
Results
The Adland Lego sets were a massive success. The event immediately following the campaign sold out in record time and attendances have stayed that way. In a massive PR coup, the sets were featured by all the major industry publications including Lürzer’s Archive, Adage, Creativity-Online and Campaign, gaining thousands of pounds of free PR for the IPA 44 Club. Now young people know what the IPA does, the kind of people the 44 Club attracts and that the talks are a fun way to build their careers.
Our Thoughts
In a relatively small industry such as the UK advertising scene, Direct Mail is the natural medium for agencies to use for their own B to B communications let alone for their clients. It’s just that they don’t know how to do it so they either do it badly or not at all. So it’s cheering to see a top ad agency like Leo Burnett (a) opting to use Direct Mail in the first place and (b) bringing to the job the same polish they would to a TV or outdoor campaign.
Really beautifully crafted. Love the in-jokes.
Let it be a lesson to other ad agencies. DM works. And, in B2B, often better than other media. And (the clincher) it can win awards.