If you’ve ever doubted the capacity of savvy marketing to transform an average product into the must-have slice of cool, check out this brilliant eBay campaign from early 2009. Dubbed “The Wicked Sick Project”, the creative team at Australian advertising agency George Patterson Y&R bought an unimpressive and used BMX from eBay and relisted it with lashings of their ‘rad to the power of max!’ marketing flair.
Screen capture of original eBay listing below, via 2oceansvibe.com [click to enlarge].
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icecreamguru
April 24th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
OK – knowing a bit about how these things work the main issue here was the bike was worth around $100 on second hand market. Sometimes on eBay the “average” level price is not achieved – they got the bike for $27.50 – so a bargain. When they relisted the price went up because they hyped it up – read “advertised it more”. So they gaind around $100 – my next question is when someone asks them to put on similar effort to advertise their product would they/their agency do it for $100 (incl GST) ? I think not. At least they had fun – and we had fun watching it
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alexavery
April 24th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
I love the ad, the idea and creativity.
My only question is why are Anthill hyping something that happened in mid-2009? You gonna bust some dancing Matt on us next?
Got anything fresh in the “creative” space?
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Steve
April 26th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Great – so we made $100 – if it really was a commercial transaction as I assume the test sets out to emulate, the theoretical expenses of 2 of Patts best and brightest, say 1 x hour copywriting (or is that making up “sick” stats that are obviously untrue) at say $150 and Ebay costs say $5 as well as time answering dumb questions from Ebayers about how hard is it to do one of the 687 sick wheelies (account management) etc etc… So I think you guys are right this DOES prove the value (or lack thereof) of creativity without a sound business proposition behind it. Creativity can work but it must be tied to and enhance commercial outcomes if any money is to be made, which was obviously the yardstick here.
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