Which came first, the chainsaw or the egg?

I’ve just finished chairing the media category for this years WPP awards celebrating creating excellence, the WPPed Creams (can you see what we did there?).

In the five years since their inception the number of entries into the media category has grown four fold and the number of different types of agencies has doubled. Every type of agency wants to be seen as media leaders, it is after all where the action is.

Whilst without doubt the best media ideas were coming from the media agencies, I wanted to share two great examples that you might otherwise miss.

Firstly Jupiter Drawing Room (the integrated agency from South Africa) found an inspired way to sell more eggs.

Malnutrition is still a serious issue within townships, and eggs provided a rich source of essential nutrients and proteins. Jupiter Drawing Room came up with the idea of a ten part cooking show all focused around different ways of using the both humble and mighty egg. But this ‘content’ answer isn’t the clever bit – the ‘distribution’ strategy was.

In developed countries you’d simply buy some key words and distribute around the web, but with less than 6% internet penetration this wasn’t going to work, so JDR found the answer in the revolutionary media of: the DVD. More specifically, they used the vast and illegal pirate DVD network to turn 10,000 printed cooking DVDs into untold millions: a very smart solution in a market that has 75% DVD penetration. So smart, that egg sales increased by 94,000,000 year on year.

But perhaps topped by Grey Portugal’s highly original distribution idea for the horror channel MOV. MOV wanted to support its upcoming ‘Masters of Horror’ season in an original way, and boy did they succeed.

Instead of tapping into conventional media options they, in a moment of inspired and genuinely nuts thinking, partnered with Pecol.

Not heard of Pecol? Well they happen to be Iberia’s leading chain of hardware stores, and if you’d opened their catalogue during the campaign you find a QR code next any tool featured in any of MOV horror movies. That right there was an invitation to ‘see this in action’, next to the one thing that Pecol and MOV had in common – tools, lots of tools. Chainsaws, hammers, axes, scissors and all the other hardware classics used in the movies. Whilst the campaign was pulled in two days the catalogues sold out, the message was spread and the shows a success. Great thinking where the magic was in the distribution and the arresting context of the message.

It will be September when these two, and many more find out is their thinking has made them winners but for now they show that not only does everyone want to be in, but that anything can be media.