On your balcony,
fresh-brewed coffee
Lift delivers samples to highrise dormitories
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jun 18, 2009
We wish we could tell you more, and we would if we understood Turkish.
But what we do know about this alternative media stunt is worth relating. It was one of those smart campaigns that you look at once and just get it.
Imagine this: You're sitting in your living room and you hear a knock on your front door. But it's not your front door. It's your balcony.
Someone is knocking on your balcony door, which seem even more odd since you live on the fifth floor.
You rush to the window and see a man and a woman waving to you. They appear to be standing in mid-air off your balcony.
Really they're standing on a lift of the sort telephone workers ride on to reach tall lines.
They’re holding steaming cups of coffee.
You walk out on the balcony, and they offer you a cup of joe.
You chat for a minute as they talk up the coffee and then wave goodbye, as they crank their lift to the balcony above.
The stunt, for a coffee shop in Istanbul, Turkey, called Café Crown, was a twist on traditional sampling that advertisers have used for years.
But here the emphasis was not on the sample--good coffee, certainly--but on the means of delivery. Presumably, having tasted the good coffee, some of those samplers will begin buying their coffee from Café Crown. But everyone will talk about the stunt, and the talk will linger in people's minds long after.
In this case, the campaign targeted college students living in dorms, and that's the shop's ideal demographic: Young people open to new experiences at time where they are establishing their life preferences.
The campaign, by an agency called Youth Republic, would probably have not worked nearly as well at, say, a condominium of retired people, where the first instinct at the sound of the knock would have been to call the cops.
It’s not the first creative campaign that Youth Republic has done for Café Crown targeting the Istanbul college crowd. In April, the agency went to local college libraries armed with small papers that, when folded around a book, looked like a spine.
The agency wrapped the faux spines around books all over the library. When students went searching for books in the stacks during their studies, they came across these papers saying “Have a Café Crown break.”
The campaigns were picked up by various ad blogs, but efforts by Media Life to get more details from the agency were frustrated by the language barrier. Folks at the agency speak some English. Media Life speaks no Turkish.
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