Unilever has joined the ever growing list of companies that are recruiting the creative spark of the general public to create their next brand TV advert. For 16 years, Unilever has hired a advertising agency called Lowe for designing and creating their TV ad campaigns for all the Peperami products.
However, now they are changing their approach and going for a more personal touch. Unilever will be giving the winner of the competition £6,000, as long as the advert contains their famous ‘animal’ character. The competition is going to be held on the IdeaBounty website which also hold competitions for other big name brands such as BMW. Once a winner has been found, they will be allowed to help within the build process of their TV advert using the help of the SmartWorks agency.
Unilever is definately not the first company to hire the public to create a new advertising campaign idea. Last year other food based brands, Pringles and Doritos, both held competitions for new TV adverts, some of which you may be familier with.
Both of these competition winners came out better for it after they spent very little money on the adverts that they built. The winning Doritos advert cost less than £10 to make as it used stop motion filming with a bag of Doritos and a jar of dip. The winner of the Pringles advert did spend a little bit more, £300, however they still made a tidy sum after they won £2,000 for the advert, certainly a lot less than what a real TV ad agency would have been payed for the job.
We don’t really have any idea why companies opt for a public approach to building a new advert campaign rather than hiring a UK graphic design company, there could be a number of reasons for this choice. The reason most used by the companies is that they get more creative ideas from the minds of the general public compared to the ideas generated from a small group of hired professionals. However, there are some other reasons that could have been the cause, the first one is that the competition creates more brand awareness for the product. The other reason, which sounds more likely, is that it works out cheaper to run a competition for a new advert rather than pay an expensive professional marketing company.
