By Malay Desai
By: O&M, Bangalore
Calling it the country’s first ‘tweeple-powered’ collection launch, Allen Solly created a ‘live’ hoarding at a Bangalore mall which unveiled itself with more and more tweets. Hosted by an emcee and displaying the tweets real-time on a big screen, the hoarding claimed to have been connected to a computer-powered ‘solenoid’ (coil) which would push a shirt off it with more tweets. Through the event, the shirts began falling off, being rewarded to lucky tweeters. Behind all the shirts emerged a promotional visual of the new collection.
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A favourite ‘constructive’ pastime of web-savvy marketers among you is to be clued into advertising trends from abroad and be particularly vocal when once in a while, a novel idea comes across and you share the YouTube video to colleagues. Most often, it ends there and you return to creating your next drab by the traffic signal. Well, this is one of those campaigns, but the good/bad news for you is, someone’s done it here.
Allen Solly, one of India’s long-serving apparel brands has targeted professionals through the 90s and 2000s through sharp visuals of free-spirited casuals. Not to take away anything from this campaign, the brand already enjoys a neat recall among its target audience – the upwardly mobile urban pro, also a reason why the tweeple (Twitter users) here didn’t mind associating themselves with it.
The idea isn’t phenomenally new, really. Dozens of marketers have initiated outdoor campaigns for their web-savvy customers using QR codes, Wi-Fi and social networks; but we’re talking about the West and the geekery-loving Taiwan/Hong Kong here. The agency’s best bet was Bangalore, with its young IT crowd, and it seems to have worked.
The ‘Tweet to win’ route is boring already, but turning that into a live event (we’re guessing the media would’ve been called too) was the scoring point here. A high footfall zone would ensure high Twitter traction (not everyone’s on Twitter yes, but wouldn’t you mind signing up to win a crisp shirt?) and who doesn’t like that these days?
Zooming out, we see that this event was an offline integration of the campaign’s online initiatives. The others were a website that gave 52 Friday dos and a Facebook page that had a card game going. Not bad syncing at all.
Urban Indians have long begun to respect Fridays, and Allen Solly through its sustained campaigns has almost given us an impression that they’ve invented the Friday dressing idea.
The next time someone’s watching campaign videos such as these on a Friday evening and going ‘this ain’t happening here’, you have a video to show. Especially if you’re the client.
