An advertising competition that challenged members of the public to come up with new creative ideas for Peperami has been won by two industry professionals.
Back in August 2009 the Unilever snack brand announced it had ditched its advertising agency, Lowe, and was turning to the masses to come up with the creative for its next advertising campaign.
The move was lauded as a brave one with the brand handing over control to the public, allowing them to engage with, but pass their own judgement on the values of Peperami.
User generated adverts that have gone on to be used in an official capacity are nothing new, with the practice being adopted in different territories by Doritos, Dove, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Lea and Perrins, Pringles and Brylcreem amongst others.
But in an interesting turn of events the Peperami marketing team have picked two industry professionals to win the competition, in effect, swapping the creative team at Lowe for a couple of advertising freelancers. Both were recently made redundant from their staff positions.
Kevin Baldwin, a copywriter from London, will receive £6,000 ($10,000) for TV and print campaign ideas; while Rowland Davies, an ex-creative director from Munich will receive half that sum for a TV campaign idea.
Baldwin has been a copy-writer since the mid 1980’s at a number of different agencies and worked across various FMCG brands, whilst Davies, an ex-creative director has been shooting TV commercials for almost 20 years and has been running his own agency for three years.
“We were so overwhelmed with the level of entries and range of high-quality creative ideas pitched for the brief that we found it impossible to pick one, so we bought two!,” said Marketing Manager at Peperami, Noam Buchalter.
“A large proportion of submissions were from experienced, creative professionals and being the first crowd-sourcing project for the brand, we couldn’t have asked for a better response. We’re certain the two ideas will be a successful campaign for the Peperami brand and the legendary Animal.”
Specialist agency, Smartworks are now set to start work to produce the ad. Further detail on the advertising campaign will be revealed next year.
It’s a sad day. Peperami could easily have benefited from some great PR by giving Joe Public a break in the advertising industry.
But what was heralded as a great user generated project has just seen them swapping one professional ad team for another while making a saving on agency fees.
You can be sure members of the public will feel duped. We hope Peperami are prepared for the backlash.