Posts Tagged ‘Wispa’

Over the years, my company has worked with a great many heritage brands – from Horlicks to Gordon’s Gin, Hovis, Selfridges, R White’s Lemonade and of course Wispa. I understand, as a consequence, that these sorts of brands – usually on the back of iconic advertising campaigns and careful PR that pushes all the least sickly nostalgia buttons – connect with the public deeply, right in the heart.
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An article in today’s Independent on brand name changes, comebacks and stunts, mentioning the Borkowski Wispa campaign and quoting me from a blog, originally published here.

“We should really have learned from the past. Cadbury started making Wispa bars again two years ago after an online campaign by chocoholics supposedly nostalgic about their 1980s heyday. The PR guru Mark Borkowski behind the ’story’ denies it was a stunt. (In a series of blogs about the awards his campaign won, he wrote: ‘We designed a press campaign informed by the amount of online pressure groups that had been running for over two years, to twist Cadbury’s arm to bring back this favourite.’)”

To read the full article, click here.

You couldn’t move anywhere this morning without hearing something about Ben Southall, the British winner of ‘The Best Job in the World’ and the string of idyllic desert islands along the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia, which will act as his home and office for six months. Not surprising, when the job is more like a paid holiday and earns him approximately £74,000!

The campaign, run by Tourism Queensland, is a fine example of PR left to do what it does best – spread a positive story as far and wide as possible in a glowing light. And you don’t get a much more glowing, positive light than in Australia, thanks to the ‘can do’ attitude of the Australians and the sunshine. The story behind this job spread virally throughout the world with a little careful placing on YouTube and Facebook – ‘The Best Job in the World’ was a fantastic hook to take advantage of social networking with.

“This is probably the first time that a campaign has achieved this sort of reach with so little advertising spend other than a few strategically placed job ads around the world,” Australian marketing analyst Tim Burrowes told the Daily Mail. “This has all been about the power of people passing things on, largely through YouTube. The main lesson to be learned here is that if you have an original, exciting idea that gets people talking you don’t need to spend huge on advertising.”

He’s absolutely right, but there are still too many people with great talent of great products out there stuck in relationships with advertising men who just don’t get this or who think that PR is ‘easy’. These are people who will hang on to a client by hook or by crook, telling them what they want to hear and not letting the story out to run free.

It’s amazing what free-thinking PR can do: Borkowski’s award-winning campaign for Wispa won Cadburys huge, nationwide coverage for the return of the iconic 80s chocolate bar and created a conversation with the people who actually bought the bars and wanted it to come back. Through social networking, they were able to be a part of the process. The same is true of the ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign – it spread virally because people felt they were part of it.

The final 50 candidates even competed to gather more followers on the web and interact with them, dressing in Scuba outfits and filming themselves walking through cities being one of the popular stunts. It’s appropriate, given that part of the job remit is to communicate with the world from the island. This, then, is a PR campaign that will just keep on unfolding.

If the ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign had stayed in the hands of advertisers who felt they could manage a little easy PR on the side, however, the story would have been far less likely to have the enormous impact it has had in a little over four months. PR needs to be let free to do what it needs to do – if the ‘Best Job in the World’ story had stayed in the hands of Machiavellian advertising men who are most skilled at managing a client’s expectations and keeping the client in a hole, who claim knowledge of PR when the client knows nothing of it, then it would have faltered at the first.

The campaign could also have easily faltered under the weight of stories about the other islands near to Hamilton Island, where Southall will be taking up residence as caretaker for six months. On the Today programme this morning, Chloe Hooper revealed the darker side of Australia’s relationship with the islands; she talked about Palm Island, founded in 1918 as a prison island for ‘misbehaving’ indigenous Australians – misbehaving meaning speaking their own language or asking about wages.

This is not an island the tourist industry would want known about, especially as indigenous Australians are still beaten and murdered there – Hooper related an incident from 2004 a drunken indigenous Australian swore at the white officer in charge of Palm Island and was found beaten with his liver cut in two some hours later – and the life expectancy is 20 years less for the indigenous population than it is for a non-indigenous Australian.

This story could well explode in the tourist commission’s faces – there is a curious dichotomy between the ‘can do’ attitude of the Australians and the institutionalised racism that survives in the country still. But, by allowing the positive story free reign, they have kept the negative angle at bay for now.

If they can use the waves of unleashed positivity to help address this negative aspect of the Australian psyche – and break down the barriers contained by the barrier reef – all the better, but it’s worth realising that, in the hands of an advertising agency which thinks it understands PR, there would never have been the vast positives in the first place, nor the room to address the darker side of Australia and its relationship with the indigenous population in a constructive, transparent manner.

Luckily, someone at the PR Week Awards was on hand with a camera to capture the Borkowski team’s exuberant stage invasion post the announcement of the team winning the Campaign of the Year Gold Award for the Cadbury’s Wispa campaign. The footage below proves beyond doubt that the only thing to go quietly to the stage was the Wispa itself.

In the grainy film, one can see a clearly over-the-moon Larry Franks, Borkowski’s MD, arriving onstage and skidding to his knees at the feet of Bill Bailey, who gives him a hug, before he leaps up to clutch the award in the manner of an England footballer who’s just scored a double hat-trick in the World Cup Final.

He’s followed by the entire Borkowski team, pleased as punch and just as giddy in their glad rags, smiling fit to split their faces as the award statue flies over their heads, gathering into the sort of group shot that is usually used to sell ensemble TV shows about hip and edgy people doing hip and edgy things in hip and edgy places. Not too far removed from the truth, then…

It’s a shame that the footage ends where it does – but one can always fill in the details of what followed for oneself. I’m currently imagining the entire team taking turns to make their version of the Gwyneth Paltrow Oscar acceptance speech, hot tears of joy soaking the award as they cradle it like a newborn baby. It makes for a most charming scene!

The last time we entered the PR Week Awards was fifteen years ago. Then, we won the award for Best Promotional Activity for a publicity stunt that involved a circus and a clown. It was a well-earned award, beating Freud’s Planet Hollywood campaign.

For many reasons, however, we have not entered since then. This year, however, our new business director, Suresh Raj, thought it would be a good idea to put forward our Wispa campaign for Best Digital Innovation. So the team –and assorted clients– turned up to the Grosvenor House Hotel last night to eat rubbery lamb and sip mediocre red wine and quaff catering champagne, not expecting to win the award.

The evening was chaotic. I met loads of old pals and was pleased to see Nick Band, as I mistakenly thought he had died a couple of years ago. The Awards floorshow came from Bill Bailey, who was extraordinarily good. His best line was: “I don’t trust joggers, they’re the ones who always find the dead bodies”.  I think he was warned at least twice not to take the piss out of the PR trade via hastily scribbled note-lets.

I have a huge amount of respect for Colin Byrne but, if I am completely honest, I wasn’t too enthused when the Product and Promotion Marketing and Communications Award went to Weber Sandwich for a patio heater campaign, on behalf of the Energy Saving Trust, beating what was without a doubt one of the best campaigns of last year; the Homer Simpson effigy next to the Cerne Abbas chalk giant staged by Beatwax.

I was blown away, however, when we were given the Digital Innovation award for our Wispa campaign. Danny Rogers, the editor of PR Week, noted that the Cadbury’s Wispa campaign stood out because it expertly harnessed social media to great sales effect.

I had to scoot off early, content that we had achieved something significant. To my amazement, twenty minutes later I received a call from Suresh saying we’d been awarded the Gold Award for Campaign of the Year for our Bring Back Wispa campaign. I was gob-smacked and delighted.

I suppose, if we’d lost, that I might be bleating about how unfair and biased the awards were, but clearly they’re not! It was fantastic to hear that some of the Borkowski team disgraced themselves on stage and that our MD had a Jimmy Bullard moment, skidding across the stage on his hands and knees to take the award from Bill. One sobering thought was that I had to pick up an extraordinary bar bill, which underlined the drunken celebrations that went on until the early hours.

That said, I am blessed with some extraordinary people who work tirelessly to forge campaigns. It’s wonderful to have that recognized by the industry.