You’ll want to live here
Issue 19 | June 2011
Agency
Proximity Colombia
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer: Mario Bertieri; Creative Executive Officer: Sandra Piedrahita; Creative Director: Alejandro Mesa; Copywriter: Emilio Mutis; Art Director: Martha Montenegro; Web Design: Jonathan Mcvinish
Other Credits
Account VP: Juan Fernando Nino; Account Director: Carolina de la Torre; Account Executive: Sara Barrera
Date
October 2010
Background
Parque Arauco owns shopping malls in Colombia and they wanted to show that in the new Parque Arboleda Mall, shoppers could find everything they needed in a single place. The only problem was that every other mall made the same claim. So,
Idea
To prove that Parque Arboleda really did have absolutely anything and everything you might need, Sebastián Giraldo set up home there and lived in store #126 for two months. He bought his groceries there, bought everything he needed and ate in the restaurants, becoming a friend to all the mall’s many visitors.
Others were able to follow his daily life through the mall’s web page. Thus the mall’s advertising tagline, “A store so good you’ll want to live there’, was brought to life.
Results
8,000 people had read Sebastian’s blog within a week. On Facebook, friend requests exceeded the target by 406% and Sebastian drove more visitors to Parque Arboleda than anticipated as well as becoming an important part of the life of the mall.
Our Thoughts
TV shows have sometimes taken advertising lines and tried to see if they work in real life, with amusing results. In one experiment, a boy soused with Axe/Lynx tried to seduce pretty girls in a shopping arcade in Sydney, but they ran from him and had him arrested. Here’s the same line of thinking. Take the advertising claim and put it into the real world, only in this instance it has worked rather well.
Personally I hate malls. They are almost always utterly joyless. Places that are loud and colourful, certainly, but places with no soul. Yet this idea put a real heart into a mall and turned a tag-line into an idea people could, and did, join in with.