No news is good news, goes the old adage, however, not being in the news is pretty much terrible news of you’re trying to make a name for yourself. As people do their best to try and achieve media coverage through marketing, the ideas we have to come up with need to be more and more outrageous and/or ingenious.
At the moment, a video made by Upwell is doing the rounds and making it to semi-viral status. The idea behind the video is great, as is the execution. You can watch the full thing below, but in essence the guys behind this new and innovative product disguised it as an IKEA product in order to test it in the market without having to go through expensive market research.
“An independent design studio called Upwell recently infiltrated IKEA as a unique way to test the validity of their new product.”, wrote PSFK in their coverage of the this ingenious hijack yesterday. True, the idea of saving on product market research was brilliant, but I find it pretty stunning to see that none of the major industry sites covering it saw it for what it was: a publicity stunt.
And this, in my opinion, is where the real brilliance of the campaign came in. By adding a raison d’etre to the video itself, they diverted the attention away from the marketing message onto the hack, meaning that most sites covering it only wrote about the hack, and not the major marketing coup.
So, great job to team for coming up with an event that deserves coverage, telling the story in an interesting way and for shooting a video that is worth sharing. They hit all the elements of a great marketing campaign, and as a bonus, they disguised it as something else and made it appear as if they were being devious, making people feel even better when sharing it.
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