McCann Melbourne Made Up a Word to Sell a Print Dictionary
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What does it take to sell a new edition of a national dictionary? In Australia, one publisher is hoping a year-long guerilla marketing campaign and the birth of a word will be enough.
Over the past year, McCann Melbourne has quietly been seeding a new word across the world-“phubbing.” It’s a term coined by a group of lexicographers, poets and authors during a consortium convened by the agency at the University of Sydney last May to describe the phenomenon of ignoring people in front of you in favor of paying attention to your phone. After they came up with the word, McCann got to work, creating a website, StopPhubbing.com, a Facebook page, and devising a PR strategy.
When one of the agency’s account executives, Alex Haigh, spotted an article on smartphone etiquette in The Herald Sun, he wrote to the writer with details about “Stop Phubbing,” prompting the first of many articles about the phenomenon. The word has since spread around the world, with McCann creatives tracking it through Australia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Latin America and the U.S.
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