Hasta La Creative!

Pulco, a French drink brand owned by Orangina Schweppes, is a default summer drink. (Because when else would you have a cool citrus-lemon beverage?) And amid an epic heatwave recently, it capitalized on that positioning with #LaParesseADuBon. Roughly translated to “Laziness can be good,” it encouraged people to relax and go slow—because what else is there to do when you see mirages while crossing the street?

Earlier this month, with help from agency Fred & Farid, it illustrated that premise by taking seven days to finish posting a single-line Facebook status update. The post unfolded word by word, and eventually read, “It’s too hot to work.”

And while it’s too late to watch it as it happened, you can see the painfully slow progression when you click on the post’s “Edited” button:

While it didn’t capture much attention outside the ad industry (which fawns over itself in France just as much as it does in the U.S.), this is a nice example of how creative can manipulate the mechanics of social platforms to produce something unique and playful—and which, in this case, loyally manifests the brand’s message.

It’s also a tribute to Pulco that it let an incomplete sentence stand for a week without freaking out. It doesn’t look like Pulco spends much, media buy wise, but the post scored at least twice as many likes as any number of its painstaking but minimalist image posts. It won’t win Lions or anything, but it’s evidence that while engagement might be low, the brand is willing to experiment and be a bit scrappy.

Seven days is apparently also a record for the longest amount of time it’s taken anyone, ever, to produce a single Facebook post (at least according to the agency and brand). Other examples of brands who’ve broken social media records, however contrived, can be found on RecordSetter.com’s Social Media World Records subsite.

In the weeks since the Omnicom and Publicis Groupe megamerger fell apart, many have been asking why such a problematic union was proposed in the first place. Well now we know: It was all another agency's elaborate marketing stunt.

In an entertaining parody case study, Fred & Farid Group takes full credit for the "Omnipub" merger, an idea hatched to highlight just how far holding companies would go in their quest for world domination.

"Why not organize an epic fail with two giants? Instead of the usual David against Goliath, we made a Goliath against Goliath story. We created … 'The Impossible Wedding.'"

Setting events in motion like a Shakespearean villain, Paris-based Fred & Farid says it forged letters between Omnicom CEO John Wren and Publicis CEO Maurice Lévy, making each think the other was on board with the merger. Then the pranksters sat back and watched the hilarity ensue.

Like any good case study, #Omnipub includes some impressive metrics: 24,000 mentions, 500,000 media impressions and $100 million in wasted fees (quoted from our own coverage here at Adweek). 

So congrats to Fred & Farid for pulling off one truly epic viral prank. You got us!

Se você já passou pela situação de ser mal-interpretado alguma vez na vida, especialmente em um outro país e em outro idioma, o filme da agência Fred & Farid para a Société Générale certamente vai despertar lembranças.

A ação se passa na China, quando um jovem francês tenta se comunicar com a atendente de uma casa de câmbio. O pedido dele é simples: “me dê o dinheiro agora”. Primeiro, pede em francês, depois, em inglês. Sem sucesso, tenta a mímica e, por último, faz o que qualquer pessoa com a tecnologia de um tradutor no bolso faria: escreve a frase no celular e mostra para o outro ler.

O problema é que nem sempre o resultado é o esperado, especialmente quando o interlocutor não entende direito o pedido. E é aí que a confusão começa…

A mensagem da Société Générale é que, se você quer estudar no exterior, melhor ter um serviço financeiro que entenda você. Sem erro.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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