Precise Measurements
Issue 13 | December 2009
Agency
Wunderman London
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: David Harris, Creative Head: James Nester, Creative Head: Chris Lawson, Web Designer: Ivan Pinto, Designer: Kevan Ansell
Date
May 2009
Background
Kern calibrates and distributes some of the world’s most accurate scales. With a featherweight budget they hoped to dramatise the extraordinary precision of their tools and start a conversation going with their key prospects in the scientific community/
Idea
The audience of boffins, engineers and pharmacists were challenged to a ‘Guess the weight’ competition with a difference. They were invited to estimate the weights of extremey low-mass objects.
A feather.
A puff of wind.
Online video experiments then demonstrated how Kern scales are some of the most precise in the world.
Results
The idea certainly appealed to prospects’ intellectual curiosity. 44.5% of all those mailed responded and €50,000 of additional revenue was achieved. Twenty new resellers signed up who, it is estimated, will generate an extra €1.2m of business for Kern in 2010.
Our Thoughts
The DMA gave a gong to only one part of this campaign, the B to B mailer, but it seems to me to be even better in its entirety. Here mail and digital work in tandem quite beautifully, the letter driving traffic to the videos and to the competition online.
The idea of printing its precise weight onto every letter, business card and compliments slip is absurdly simple. It’s an idea which gets you measuring everything, mentally. What does the ink on this page weigh? Or my eyelash? How much lighter is my eyelash than my mascara’d wife’s? And every question is branded Kern. Not just a direct idea but a brand idea too.
Under David Harris, and with work like this, Wunderman is recovering some of the creative form it showed when Steve Harrison had his name on the door.