When Roy Hawes was opening his tackle shop last summer, aiming to attract the local fishermen of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England, he knew he had to advertise to let those fishermen know about the store.
But Hawes had literally no money to spend. So he approached a friend, Mike Borrett, the art director of a local agency, HPS Group, with his predicament.
The two cut a deal. The agency would come up with a super low-cost campaign and Hawes would pay for it in fishing tackle.
So the creatives at HPS in nearby Marlow sat down to brainstorm over a smart campaign that would cost next to nothing.
The subject was fish and fishing, and as they kicked one idea around and then another, someone thought of the store and the parking lot in front of it and the entrances to that parking lot. There were three, each with a boom of sorts that's raised to let cars in.
And there was the idea: Create a visual experience of fishing, with the boom serving as a fishing pole.
So the crew set about rigging the three booms with make-believe fish on a line, so when the boom went up it looked as though the fish was being pulled from the water.
Commuters entering the parking lot were greeted by a rising boom, fish attached, and in case they missed the point, the booms had the web address of the store across them, http://www.marsh-tackle.com.
"Knowing that the client wouldn’t have much money for media, we deliberately looked at ambient opportunities, which led us to the car park barrier idea," says Richard Selbourne, creative director at HPS.
It worked. The campaign ran for one day and cost little but got lots of buzz, including a feature story in a local newspaper, a fishing publication and an online fishing magazine.
The campaign also earned accolades for the agency as well, specifically a Gold Award at the Fresh Creative Awards 2008, which are for regional agencies in the UK.
