Fisher-Price And Walkers

Creative, light-hearted, and fun PR campaigns are a great way to engage with an audience. Here are two of our favourites from the last month.

We are all familiar with scenes of young children finding just as much joy playing with a cardboard box as they do with the toy which came inside, and that is exactly what Fisher-Price is capitalising on with its latest campaign. The market leader for educational toys invites its audience to reconnect with their inner child and find a new meaning for the everyday objects around them.

The multi-platform campaign kicked off with a video that imagines a broom becoming a guitar, a hairbrush doubling as a microphone, and an ironing board as a surfboard. The Instagram campaign goes even further with graphics that repackage everyday objects as toys.

Why we like it: This campaign is clever because it doesn’t mention a single one of Fisher-Price’s products. Instead, it focusses on the joy of play and reignites excitement amongst an older audience who hold the buying power for its younger, target audience.

We Brits love a debate. Here at EPR we are partial to debating the best three elements of a roast dinner and the ultimate flavour of crisps (pickled onion gets my vote). Walkers has capitalised on the age-old debate on how to eat a lunchtime sandwich and packet of crisps with its #CrispIN or #CrispOUT campaign.

The tongue-in-cheek campaign launched with a 40-second montage of reactions to the iconic crisp sandwich and was supported by influencers including Gordon Ramsey and Laura Whitmore.

Why we like it: This campaign perfectly rides on the coat tails of a well-established debate in British society and encourages interaction with the brand. And there’s nothing like talking about crisps to make you crave a bag! The multi-channel, multi-tactic approach also maximises its reach and engagement so that everybody can get involved.

Who knew a caterpillar cake could be so contentious. Marks & Spencer hit headlines last month when it was revealed that the retail giant had sought legal action against Aldi over its Cuthbert The Caterpillar Cake. M&S claims that the product is too similar to its own Colin The Caterpillar Cake and their similarity leads consumers to believe they are of the same standard and could tarnish M&S’s reputation. M&S ultimately wants Aldi to remove Cuthbert from the shelf and agree not to sell anything similar in the future.

What to learn: Intellectual property is of course very serious, and a company should not jeopardise its own innovation and creativity. However, the big fly in the ointment in this case is, Aldi is not the only supermarket to have a version of a caterpillar cake, nor was it the first to imitate Colin. Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda, Morrison’s, Waitrose, and the Co-op all have their own take on the birthday staple. These have been ignored by M&S, making the company look like it’s taking Aldi to task for some other reason (such as the budget supermarket’s ever increasing market share). Aldi has used the fiasco to its advantage by launching a campaign for the group of caterpillar cakes to raise money for cancer charities, whereas M&S has come off looking like it’s thrown its toys out of the pram.