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November 2007 - Strategy Magazine
Agency of the Year

Honourable mention - Zig

SCREAM TV

With more television channels than ever in Canada, and new ones emerging faster than before, Zig faced the big challenge of getting Scream TV noticed on a very small budget. As in $50K small.

The agency opted to do something that would get folks talking. For three weeks in September, a ghost "haunted" an old Victorian house in Toronto, appearing at various times throughout the night. She was illuminated by a holographic projector and programmed to perform 40 different actions such as walking, looking down or skipping from window to window. They also released online videos of the ghost from both inside and outside the house, leaked the house's address and started online discussions revolving around the ghost's background.

In early October, the ghost revealed a message: "Get scared more often. Scream TV." People saw her raise this sign at the house, in a television spot and online.

For only $50,000, over 2.1 million people discovered the campaign online, while millions more read about it in major Canadian publications like the National Post. Thousands saw her first-hand at the house. Scream TV, which had struggled to get subscribers, saw an immediate subscription increase of 36% (13% above its objective).

The folks at Cannes especially liked what they saw: the campaign won a Gold Lion in the Publications & Media category and a Silver Lion in the Stunts category, and Zig took Bronze for Media Agency of the Year.

IKEA

Ikea had set some pretty ambitious goals for kitchens in fall 2007. The challenge to Zig: achieve an aggressive increase in kitchen sales and grow top-of-mind awareness without any additional media support. As well, the agency had to continue to chip away at the notion that Ikea's low price equals low quality, while spreading the word about the furniture retailer's design and installation services.

Building on Ikea's tradition for smart design, Zig developed the "Beauty and Brains" strategy: get on consumers' awareness list by pushing style, and move up the consideration list by showcasing function in a fun Ikea way. The structure of the campaign was simple: TV and radio were used to build mass awareness of the kitchen offering (inside and out), while newspaper and magazine ads showcased the product range in detail.

In "Fight," a 30-second TV spot, for example, a couple is in the middle of an epic argument when the audience realizes that the kitchen's brilliant self-closing drawer dampeners have rendered it slam-proof, and the cabinet doors don't rattle or crash. To combat questions surrounding its ease of assembly, Ikea distributed a handout made to look like one of their standard instruction manuals at the Interior Design Show in Toronto. Visitors learned they didn't have to lift a finger to get their kitchen properly installed.

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