High Five: Campaigns That Brought Consumer and Creative Together

PROPER Snacks, one of the UK’s leading better-for-you snack brands, brought the first-ever human claw to the streets of London. ‘The PROPER Dropper’ stopped passers-by in their tracks, as they queued to be dunked into a pit of 16,000 snacks. Inside the pit, whatever you grabbed, you won. This included hidden gold packs offering prizes from a range of brand partners in the fashion world, such as NICCE, Fila, and ByRotation. Influencers including Ash Holmes and Moyo attended, producing hilarious TikTok content that made this pop-up go viral, resulting in over 15 million social views, 135K engagements and a 2,000% uplift in TikTok followers for the brand.

To encourage Londoners to break their stereotype against imperfect produce, DASH launched its '#lovewonky' campaign with ‘wonky’ billboards, ‘wonky’ benches and ‘wonky’ posters. The campaign was strangely banned by TfL who deemed it ‘inappropriate’, so what I loved was how DASH reacted to the ban - unapologetically - by taking the posters to tube stations and physically holding them up for commuters to see.

A decade after the first iconic collaboration, this partnership came back with a bang. The brands relaunched this campaign with an amorphic display of the polka-dotted Louis Vuitton Damier trunk, which opened up to reveal three of Kusama’s iconic pumpkins. This teaser method has generated hype around the NPD, with Louis Vuitton’s social media teasers on Instagram already amassing over 24 million views.

Following a decline in sales, purpose-led magazine The Big Issue used innovative geo-location technology to help its vendors - who are primarily homeless or vulnerable – in re-engaging with local communities. When a seller was close to a digital billboard, their image would display on that OOH screen with a personal message for anyone passing by - making them impossible to miss. The activation saw sales increase by 400% and social engagement by 860%.

Whilst we often see genuine, purpose-led activity from smaller brands in the industry, it’s great to see brands of all sizes providing a platform to people entering the highly competitive creative industries. I love the ongoing collaboration between Apprentice Nation and Lucozade which is helping engage young people to get career-ready. They have seen over 4,000 young people apply, and have also have offered stand-out participants a ‘Lucozade Bursary’ to invest in career plans.