We are big believers that a great idea shouldn’t have to cost the Earth – financially or environmentally. Often the most impactful of PR campaigns or stories can be delivered to a finite budget. All you need is creativity, a great idea and smart execution (easy, right?).
Our commitment to that mantra has seen us taking home awards for low budget campaigns over the years but it’s also landed us in a few bizarre situations – going head to head with a hostage negotiator, being dressed as a human pea pod outside parliament, releasing seals into the wild and supervising 150 dogs in an indoor snow centre on the hottest day of the year come to mind.
In honour of our love for a low budget campaign, and our even deeper love for food and drink, we’ve pulled together a round up of our favourite low cost brand activations.
Surreal’s Smart Tactic for Imitating Celeb Endorsement
Cereal brand Surreal, known for its tongue-in-cheek activations, delivered once again with a smart campaign centred around its glowing celebrity endorsements (without the price tag). Call them audacious but Dwayne Johnson, Serena Williams and Michael Jordan were amongst the widely recognised names emblazoned all over their campaign creative. What makes it genius is they weren’t endorsements from those famous faces at all but just ordinary people – bus drivers and students – who happen to share their name.
Cadbury’s Half and Half Crème Egg
Just when you think a Crème Egg can’t get any more lovely, Cadbury’s brings out a white chocolate one. Then when you think you’ve reached the peak of chocolate-induced happiness, they bring out a half white, half milk Crème Egg.
What was even more special about these eggs is that you were highly unlikely to be lucky enough to get your hands on them and if you did, there was a potential £10,000 up for grabs. Reliving our childhood Willa Wonka fantasy is one thing but there’s nothing that makes an idea fly better than scarcity and the chance of an incredible reward. Anyway, safe to say it was reported far and wide and all they had to do was produce and hide 146 Crème Eggs.
Ketchup Fraud
Ketchup is serious business, especially when it’s Heinz. If the recent ‘ketchup fraud’ campaign is anything to go by, Heinz is confident of that too. So much so, they’ve released a series of images of restaurant workers filling up Heinz ketchup bottles with ‘inferior’ substitutes. It’s a simple yet bold statement that their ketchup is better than any other brand out there, whilst also highlighting that if it doesn’t taste like Heinz, it probably isn’t. It was substantiated with research showing 20% of restaurants confess to refilling bottles, strengthening its newsworthy angle, and responded to a video that went viral on Snapchat of one restaurant caught in the act.
Marmite Scans Babies to Find Lovers and Haters
Just when you think you’ve heard it all… Marmite adds ammunition to it’s loved or hated status by targeting expectant families with a campaign to determine if a baby is going to love it or hate it. It was delivered in partnership with Window to the Womb, the national chain of baby scan clinics, and supported by research from Durham University that suggests babies in the womb respond facially to food eaten by their mother’s. The jury’s out on whether this one was a genius idea or just utterly ridiculous, but either way it got people talking.
Northern Monk’s Most Expensive Beer
Call us biased but it only seems right to throw one of our own in here. Hatch worked with Northern Monk brewery to launch its Ben Nevis brew, the UK’s most expensive beer – Ben Nevis because we hiked the mountain and brewed the beer at the summit. Pretty inventive if you like hiking and you know how to brew an exceptional beer. LadBible thought so too, as they joined the hike as part of an editorial partnership, documenting the journey with video content, simply because they loved the idea. The beers sold for over £10,000, raising money for Northern Monk’s For The North Foundation (to benefit Northern communities) and the launch along achieved 45 pieces of coverage with a reach of over 4.5 million. Cheers to that!
It goes to show that you don’t always have to be restricted by a finite budget. Ideas can often speak for themselves. All you need is a good agency with the belief that great campaigns don’t have to cost the Earth. Get in touch for a chat at hello@hatch.group or even better, pop in for a cuppa.
