When I was in my first year of university I signed up for a slovakian marketing competition Cirkulátor with my friend Jan Rákosník. It was a unique challenge that you don't get a chance to do everyday at work. The rules of the competition were simple - It will last 24 hours. On Saturday morning (9AM) we received an email with 4 short briefs. The finished idea for the campaign had to be sent till the morning on the next day. https://cirkulator.eu/en/
We chose to think about a marketing campaign on how to help forests in Slovakia. The problem was that people leave trash in nature, some of them don't go there at all and a lot of trees are cut down every year. We figured out a very weird solution and campaign plan. We wanted to base it on fake news. It was supposed to be a sort of Guerilla campaign.
We created a forest boogeyman, something like a Slovakian bigfoot. Mysterious figure wandering around forests. We would make bad quality videos that would capture this monster all across the country. It would catch the attention of news and social media and get attention. People would be of course thinking that it is fake but they would try to figure out who it is. Later it would be revealed that it is a campaign to inform people about the forest. We would make more videos with the monster throwing trash back at people or interrupting woodcutters.
It was fun creating the presentation for the competition. We started in the university atelier and then moved to Starbucks on I. P. Pavlova in Prague. We almost ended up locked there because we were there till the closing hour and the staff crew forgot about us.
We waited a few weeks for the results but we did not expect to win something because it was kinda crazy idea. Few days before publication of the results we got the invitations to the gala night. In the and judges liked our campaign idea and we won the first place in the competition.