Amphibian Firebrands

Jul 15, 2001 12:00 PM, By Nikki Swartz, Assistant Data Editor

Creative agency StrawberryFrog has designed wildly successful, cutting-edge campaigns using viral and guerrilla marketing.

Last year, with news cameras rolling, Hans emerged. After spending two weeks hidden inside a trailer in an undisclosed European location, he was found by an online search engine user who received a nice reward for his trouble.

The “Where's Hans?” campaign to launch Microsoft's MSN search engine (www.msn.co.uk) in Europe featured a mix of advertising, entertainment, interactive media and culture. The idea, presented to Microsoft by creative agency BlueberryFrog (www.blueberryfrog.com), was to hide someone and get the public to search for him using the MSN search engine to attract attention while promoting the service.

BlueberryFrog used nine different media, from a cool Web site and “fly posters” to newspaper ads and e-mails. Everywhere the public went, everywhere it looked, there was a recurring message, “Where's Hans?” Thousands searched for him online.

Two days after the campaign began, 415,000 people had visited the MSN Web site, looking for clues to find Hans and win a reward.

“People are very sophisticated today; you cannot advertise to consumers in a traditional marketing approach where you lob a message at them and hope they're going to catch it,” said Scott Goodson, Strawberry-Frog co-founder and creative director (www.strawberryfrog.com). “Today, there's just so much stuff, so many new things out there. To get people talking about your brand, your brand almost has to be famous. We're living in a celebrity culture; your brand has to be a celebrity.”

StrawberryFrog and its sister agency, BlueberryFrog, have been called leaders of a new breed of virtual-ad makers that employ a viral and guerrilla marketing philosophy. The agency has employed revolutionary branding and marketing methods to create global multimedia campaigns for companies such as Ericsson (www.ericsson.com), Motorola (www.motorola.com), Research In Motion (RIM; www.rim.net) and Sprint (www.sprint.com).

StrawberryFrog, housed in a converted 18^th century warehouse, may not attract much attention in Amsterdam. However, its cutting-edge campaigns have raised more than a few eyebrows worldwide.

The company, which took its name from a rare, Amazonian amphibian species with blue legs and a berry-red body, was formed in 1999 as an alternative to big, corporate ad conglomerates. StrawberryFrog (and BlueberryFrog, spawned last year) is a new breed of agency focusing on creative mass communications and virtual advertising, as well as on how brands interface with contemporary culture, the Internet, guerilla and viral marketing and wireless technology. Its forte is “creating and controlling buzz about brands across borders.” They call it a “frog revolution.”

StrawberryFrog's international staff of about 25 from Belgium, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States speaks 14 languages and operates in cyberspace with a large, global network of freelance copywriters, art directors and designers. Many of the Frogs have come from technology backgrounds. In fact, Goodson got the idea for StrawberryFrog in the '80s when he worked on Ericsson's early wireless phone accounts.

“We take a new view on contemporary culture mixed with traditional advertising, and that allows us to create campaign ideas that aren't necessarily just ads but also are events,” Goodson said. “(We want to) really get people off their behinds and get them involved.”

According to its Web site, buzz and word of mouth are the most powerful tools for getting your message across in this information age.

“To be fresh and constantly entertaining and challenging, you have to take a few risks, and you have to use media that you may be uncomfortable using but that consumers are looking forward to seeing,” explained Brian Elliott, StrawberryFrog co-founder. “We try to come up with ideas independent of media that have the power to catch fire.”

Creating buzz “can be as simple as SMS or as advanced as location-aware technology that would give you the right message at the right time,” said Heather Fullerton, Blueberry-Frog managing director. “We're trying to stay on the edge of what we can use appropriately to reach the customer without invading their privacy.”

But BlueberryFrog unabashedly uses every medium necessary to create buzz and make a brand your best friend. Although its approach to creativity — viral and guerrilla marketing — may sound aggressive, it's all about generating word of mouth, online and off.

Guerrilla marketing began in the late 1970s among bands and DJs in urban cities who tacked up handmade posters on the streets to get people's attention. Viral marketing is distributing information that will spread by word of mouth or e-mail. Today, companies want to use these tactics to appear non-corporate. As in the music industry, street-level contact with consumers is key to building brand relevance, surprise and the cool factor, Goodson said.

BlueberryFrog's recipe for guerrilla marketing includes stunts, ambient marketing, viral marketing, myth marketing and short films. The medium is as much the message as the campaign.

“We don't want to push things in people's faces; we want to engage them as well, so you want to make things as interactive as possible,” said Barnaby Irish, Blueberry-Frog interactive creative director. “It's much more meaningful. You've not just gotten through to one person, you've gotten through to them in a way that they will tell 10 other people about.”

For example, the “Where's Hans?” campaign fed users daily e-mail clues about Hans' whereabouts, encouraging people to visit the site often and to forward clues to friends.

“What better way than to get people to use the search engine to find someone?” Fullerton said. “Instead of just having an ad in a newspaper saying, ‘use MSN search engine,’ we made it interesting to people's lives.”

And you can do this with almost any product, she said, and for any audience.

“Audiences are almost always more willing to see more audacious stuff from the companies than the companies themselves imagine,” Elliott said. “(Hans) proved you can create a tremendous amount of response and involvement by pushing the envelope in terms of what people consider acceptable and unacceptable.”

The Frogs' most successful viral marketing campaign to date was last year's Motorola T900 effort. For the Asian and U.S. launch, the team sent out 50,000 targeted e-mails, each including a link to a Web site that featured a short film starring “Silent Bill.” (See “Silent Bill's Wireless Revolution” sidebar.) The campaign, which targeted young adults, cost a few hundred thousand dollars to produce, and the site received more than 8.5 million hits in the first few days.

For Heineken (www.heineken.com), the Frogs fashioned an idea to enhance the beer maker's TV commercials about toasting by allowing consumers to send friends three different SMS messages with jingles.

“You're giving consumers an opportunity to spread the word, and you're not buying tons of advertising space,” Goodson said. “Brand takes on a different meaning.”

“The odd thing about the 21^st century is that the best form of advertising is still word of mouth,” Elliott explained. “But you have to generate that word of mouth in an increasingly competitive communications environment and do it in a way that is able to cross cultural barriers.”

Virgin Mobile (www.virgin.com/mobile) is a good example.

“What mobile phone network has Virgin ever built? Virgin doesn't exist,” he said. “What does exist is an idea about Virgin in the hearts and minds of consumers.”

Goodson said U.S. carriers should look to overseas markets for growth and partnerships.

“If AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com) figures out that NTT DoCoMo (www.nttdocomo.com) has the potential to become their Sony or Virgin or MTV, they will be huge,” he said.

Simplicity is the key to global and local dominance, not product features or price differentiators. Focus on simplifying the brand and building it into a lifestyle rather than selling on price and product.

“Ultimately, wireless service is something people don't touch, smell or taste,” Elliott said. “So the name that actually goes on it is the only thing that counts, and the brand association that goes along with that. Strong brands rule, that's all there is to it.”

The Motorola T900 can credit Silent Bill for its U.S. success.

He's the strange character, passed among friends via e-mail, who created a buzz for Motorola's messaging device when it was released last year.

Mark Chalmers, BlueberryFrog creative director, said the campaign reached a U.S. audience of 35 million. Rolling Stone wrote about the campaign, and Oprah Winfrey discussed it on her show.

To connect with younger audiences, Motorola needed to break a few rules and be less conservative. Chalmers said the idea was that as wireless technology becomes more effective and pervasive, the world will become silent because people can communicate wirelessly. Chalmers added that the future silent world of Motorola communication campaign was brought to life by Silent Bill.

BlueberryFrog selected a targeted audience from U.S. universities and sent out about 50,000 initial e-mails containing MPEGs with links to the site, www.leavesyouspeechless.com.

In one short film, Silent Bill, a mute pitchman clad in a motorcycle helmet and sandwich board, skated mad-cap through urban scenes, stealing ice-cream cones and playing with a puppet. Users could click on a hotlink to the site and watch his antics while learning about personal interactive communicators.

The first group of people were so amused by Silent Bill's MPEG exploits that they forwarded them to friends, and so on. Those who clicked through to the site not only got the skinny on Bill, but also could register to receive a free, special-edition T900 before the device was available in stores.

Last year, when the Adidas-sponsored U.K. football team traveled to France for a big game, creative agency BlueberryFrog projected the team's faces, along with Adidas' logo, on the White Cliffs of Dover.

As if that didn't attract enough attention, BlueberryFrog intentionally replaced one player's face with that of a stranger's. The European media covered the campaign as an event, writing articles ad naseum and generating an incredible amount of controversy over the apparent mistake. Adidas (www.adidas.com) received more press than it could have imagined.

When Europcar (www.europcar.com), the largest car rental company in Europe, added 50 Volkswagen Beetles to its fleet, BlueberryFrog named and personalized each one and designed a massive TV, print, online and wireless ad campaign around “Dixie,” “Dennis” and the other Beetles. The effort not only gave Europcar's brand more meaning but also introduced it to a new, younger generation of customers.

According to StrawberryFrog and sister agency, BlueberryFrog, the next generation of branding and marketing will take advantage of the convergence of digital and wireless media, and there will be more opportunities to use media to market products and services. So if you're introducing a new SMS service then, of course, you'll want to use SMS to spread the word.

“Smart advertisers (used to) question whether they should buy a half-page ad in 25 magazines or a billboard outside Heathrow airport,” Scott Goodson, StrawberryFrog creative director, said. “Today, it's more about the impact or the buzz you're going to get, not how many pages for the dollar.”