Match’s male model pop-up
This inventive and eye-catching campaign for dating site Match featured the opening of a "model males" pop-up shop in London, designed to encourage women to make the first move when searching for a partner.
The shop, created by Brands2Life, was stocked with 3D-printed versions of seven single males from the site. The figurines featured the name, age, occupation and best qualities of their real-life counterparts. They also included contact information. The campaign was created in response to the rise of questionable dating practices such as "ghosting" (vanishing without a trace) and "breadcrumbing" (leading someone on).
ESPN 8: The Ocho – ESPN
In a superb nod to the hit sports comedy film Dodgeball, ESPN transformed its ESPNU TV channel into ESPN 8: The Ocho for one day on 8 August. ESPN 8: The Ocho was the fictitious channel in the movie that played host to "the finest in seldom-seen sports" – including a dodgeball tournament.
The campaign, created by ESPN’s programming department in the US, included a series of alternative sports, such as the 2016 American Disc Golf Championships and Sky Zone Ultimate Trampoline Dodgeball, which aired for 24 hours. In the week before launch, tweets about the channel had a potential reach of 190 million, ESPN said, while the announcement also became a Twitter ‘moment’ on 3 August.
Can't look away.
— ESPN (@espn) August 8, 2017
The Ocho is still going strong on ESPNU. pic.twitter.com/dPqVtPXV9q
Always #LikeAGirl’ returns to fight girls’ fear of failure
Procter & Gamble has relaunched #LikeAGirl for feminine products brand Always. The award-winning campaign, which scooped the Grand Prix at Cannes PR Lions 2015 and Campaign of the Year at the 2015 PRWeek Awards, for MSLGroup, features a new execution hoping to address girls’ lack of confidence during puberty. The TV and online video, produced by Leo Burnett Chicago, is the result of research commissioned by Always, which found more than half of girls lose confidence at puberty, and seven in 10 avoid trying new things during this time through fear of failure.
‘Keep Going’ urges girls to embrace failure as fuel to build their confidence and follows a group of schoolgirls over the course of a day, when they face various challenges.
Evans updates classic Hovis ad
The agency Propellernet remade Sir Ridley Scott’s famous 1973 Hovis ad to promote its client Evans Cycles’ range of electric bikes.
The original Hovis boy Carl Barlow, now a 58-year-old retired firefighter, was brought in to showcase the benefits of the power-assisted cycles, which allowed him to finally conquer Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset. It is not the first time the classic ad has been remade, but every time it is, it taps into nostalgia, and garners column inches aplenty. The film was viewed more than 100,000 times on Facebook within days of launching.
Ancestry’s Cotswolds surprise
The family history company Ancestry and its agency Third City achieved coverage across several national, local and online publications, and BBC Breakfast, after they ran an experiment in the Cotswolds.
Ancestry tested the genetic heritage of residents of the quintessentially English village of Bledington in Gloucestershire and found, in the words of the Mail Online, "a hotbed of diversity". Residents were shown to have DNA from 18 different parts of the world, with the average villager being just 42 per cent British in genetic terms. The Mail story alone - complete with a campaign film – garnered 1,600 shares and 1,900 comments.
