Chocolate Billboard

Once upon a time, there was little imaginative thinking when using outside space for publicity stunts. Brands were merely content to have a uniform message on thousands of Adshel sites all over the Capital. I firmly believe there is a fantastic opportunity to bring outdoor advertising to life. Yesterday, we created an action in Covent Garden for our client, Thorntons.

Borkowski produced the first ever chocolate billboard, made from 128 panels of chocolate, weighing 390 kilos. It also had 72 three dimensional eggs and 10 hand crafted bunnies embedded into it. The idea was to kick off the Easter celebrations early and inviting shoppers, passers by to break off a piece. Despite the space being booked for a week, the 390kilos of chocolate were devoured in just five hours. The results were spectacular; national TV news, the BBC, web activity, chat threads, blogging postings, regional as well as national dailys, all from one small site tucked away in London.

Hoards of agencies come up with advertising which captures the public’s eye, but harnessing stories to capture the media and produce TV coverage are two totally different things. It’s difficult to impress my advertising friends in the subtle syntax of creative thinking.

It’s hard to quantify, but highly effective when it works. Until PR companies can truly have a resonance with the upstream thinking of a brand, it’s very difficult to centre a creative stunt idea to the heart of a brand. It’s interesting that while we’ve been working for Thorntons, they behave more like a challenger brand as they gain more understanding of how we can help them.

It took us eight months to get the client to invest in this outdoor event, but at the end of the day, they were overjoyed.