With apologies to Brandrepublic.com and Dave Trott

(i am “re-blogging”Dave Trott’s excellent new post over at the CAMPAIGN site. it’s great. but members only i think. Subscribe to CAMPAIGN, it’s great! that should keep their lawyers off my back)

Upstream media thinking
by Dave Trott, Jun 29 2009, 12:36 PM

A few years back there was a train crash at Paddington. This meant all the trains had to terminate a few stops before Paddington, at Ealing.

The trouble was Ealing is only a little station, and they couldn’t handle all the extra traffic.

One day we were down there waiting for a train to a client. The little station was absolutely packed. Like everyone else we were watching the information on the huge TV screens on the platform.

The passengers were giving the staff a hard time because all the TV screens were showing inaccurate information. I overheard one of the staff walk over to the station manager and say, “Everyone’s getting really upset because the trains aren’t coming in or departing at the time shown on the screens. What’ll we do?”

The station manager said, “I’ll fix it.” He got a broom and, using the handle, reached up and turned all the screens off one-by-one. Then he said, “There, problem gone.”

I thought, what an interesting approach. Don’t spend ages trying to get the screens to show the correct times. Just turn ‘em off. A great example of upstream media thinking.

Another example was BBH’s work for Boddingtons beer. Boddingtons is a Manchester beer and they wanted to make it fashionable in London. So the obvious media was Time Out, the London listings mag.

But the really clever thinking was they didn’t place the ads inside Time Out. They placed them on the outside of the back cover. Just the place no one else wanted. Because no one reading a magazine reads the back cover.

But BBH reasoned that most people read Time Out on the tube. And if you put the ad inside you only got one person. But if you put the ad outside you got everyone else in the carriage. Like a little poster.

This thinking then dictated the creative. Being little posters the ads couldn’t be fussy with lots of copy. They had to be simple, powerful graphic executions. Another great campaign that started in the media department.

I always found that’s where a lot of the real creativity came from. When the SDP was first formed, GGT had them as a client. But the real star of our campaign wasn’t the creative work, it was the media department.

Obviously you want opinion formers to see political advertising. And in an election most of those opinion formers are either in Parliament or in the news media. So how do you get to them?

You couldn’t buy poster sites anywhere near the Houses of Parliament, or Fleet Street, where the newspapers were. So Mike Gold thought, if Mohammed won’t come to the mountain bring the mountain to Mohammed.

He hired a lorry and pasted our posters on the side. Then he had the lorry drive between Parliament Square and Fleet Street. Coincidentally the lorry would get a ‘puncture’ in both places, and have to change the wheel. This meant it would be jacked-up and stationary for about thirty minutes at each end of its trip.

Which meant we had poster sites in Parliament Square and Fleet Street, for half an hour, several times a day. Great idea.

It wasn’t me that said it, but it’s true. If you’ve got a creative media department, the medium is the message.