Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Couple of things that caught my attention over the past couple of weeks.

I was at a talk by Jason Vale aka the Juice Master (no jokes please) the other week here in Dublin. I had to admire the good sponsorship by Phillips, who have partnered with Jason Vale to endorse their products. It’s a cleverly worked endorsement; if you go to the Phillips website, it looks more like a consumer lifestyle section, than a gadget store. By simply taking the obvious step and thinking how and why consumers use their products, Phillips take the approach of showing how their products can help their customers live a healthy lifestyle. At the Jason Vale event, Phillips staff were at hand to give out free juices and were literally beating off customers who were eager to buy after Vale’s enthusiastic talk. Great marketing from Phillips!

A campaign which just finished up at the weekend that I enjoyed was o2’s ‘Be the Difference‘ (disclaimer - o2 is an Edelman client and we helped to promote this campaign. I didn’t work on it.) The campaign was aimed at leveraging the mobile company’s sponsorship of the Irish national rugby team. As shirt sponsor, the campaign was an innovative way to leverage o2’s involvement with the support and directly engage rugby supporters. Effectively it is replica of a campaign which was run for the New Zealand rugby team which saw the names of fans embedded onto a player’s shirt using nanotechnology to embed their signatures onto a single thread. The o2 campaign however offered the chance for fans to submit their names and, using fine printing technology, have them make up the numbers on the back of the players’ shirts. I got to see the resulting jerseys and it was pretty cool to see the optical illusion effect as the number looks normal from afar, but up close you can see the lines of fans names making up the figure. Fantastic initiative to engage supporters and drive awareness of their sponsorship.

Media artist Patrick Bolvin created a amazing YouTube video which has fundamentally raised the bar for advertisers. Working on behalf of Sota Toys to promote their new range of Street Fights II figures, based on the classic videogame, he created an amazing video which viewers can interact with by clicking and replicating the gameplay of the original SNES title. See below and try it out for yourself.

Bolvin also recently created a similar video to promote toys from the Batman: Dark Knight range, where users can take control of the characters and take part in a breakdancing danceoff. Over 300,000 views in a fortnight!