Challenge: Capitalize on a trending Advil meme by building presence at Nuit Blanche (an urban, all-night art festival).
Insight: The cool kids tune out once they know it's a marketing play.
Approach: Make Advil part of the street art and dialogue surrounding the event: stealth-fully apply Sunglasses and Advil iconography around art exhibits near the main Nuit Blanche installations in TO & MTL.
Results: Sunglasses and Advil reached 1.3MM people and was the leading trending topic on Reddit in Toronto and Montreal that weekend. A 2013 CMA Winner. Not bad for less than a $5K investment in pain relief OOH.
Have you ever done something stupid before heading off to sleep, and regret it the next day?
The year was 2012, and widespread memeifiation of Kane West's "Sunglasses and Advil" was giving Pfizer social currency in a demographic they were technically not allowed to advertise a “hangover remedy” to (Health Canada regulation). We needed to find a way for Advil to ride this trend, as these opportunities do not come along very often in this category.
We also wanted to do something quick to sustain relevance, while keeping regulators at bay. So we took the existing iconography users were posting socially and employed a graffiti artist to drop Sunglasses and Advil visuals near Nuit Blanche parties all night long.
This allowed us to engage with younger party-goers that understood the shorthand reference, at an all-night event that would likely require "special care" the following day.
If Advil only made something for the Kanye West hangover this helped create.
