A Robot that turns into a bug

Chris Graves was an excellent host and brought up some really interesting examples of unorthodox marketing campaigns. Maybe the most impressive among this bunch had a budget of just $30,000 to convince a city to vote yes on a proposition to raise taxes to save a library on the upcoming ballot. They plastered the city with signs saying vote no and to close the Troy library, and at the bottom they advertised a book burning party afterwards. The whole town bought it and was furious at the thought that someone was actually encouraging book burning. A massive debate followed on social media as people rallied against the book burning movement. Just before the election the movement revealed that it was a hoax and garnered additional support to vote yes to save the library. The proposition won by a landslide and the library was saved, all with a brilliant idea and a small budget largely spent on yard signs. Another great example of advertising he showed us was for HBO GO, in which they played the keen insight that watching certain things with family is just awkward sometimes. To illustrate how critical it is to know your target, Chris showed us a google print campaign that solved google's struggle to recruit the most talented engineers. The campaign consisted of billboards with a problem that only the brightest engineers could solve, it challenged those who could solve it to go to a website where they had to answer several more increasingly difficult problems. Once they reached the end they were told they were congratulated and invited to an event at google and had the opportunity to join their team.

Though we were shown tons of amazing work, the most important lesson of the night came from the movie Big in a scene where Tom Hanks crashes a new product presentation and proposes a robot that turns into a bug. To the toy designer this made no sense, because he wasn't thinking like a kid while on the other hand Tom Hanks was a kid, he had the mind of a ten year old. The lesson here is to get out of the building and step out of your shoes. We all know how to think like ourselves but what we need is the empathy to understand our target audience and successfully reach them.