They're pictured, bride and groom, in wedding attire
By Toni Fitzgerald Nov 24, 2009
The couple seems the very picture of domestic bliss in their wedding day photo. They are smiling, happy and holding each other tight.
But as so often happens in life, unforeseen forces begin to draw them apart. They get separated, quite literally.
This is not your average couple, you see, but a picture of a couple on the doors of an elevator, the man on the right panel, the woman on the left.
As the doors open, man and woman separate and begin moving farther and farther apart until suddenly there's nothing left of our happy couple. They are gone.
Against the back wall of the elevator we see a sign. It reads: "Sabina Stobrawe, Divorce Lawyer. 2nd floor."
The message behind the clever visual gimmick becomes clear: When you and your spouse have separated, give Sabina a call.
The stunt, done by the gkk DialogGroup GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany, came about out of necessity. In Germany, law firms are not permitted to advertise in most traditional media or on television.
The agency was looking for a way to advertise its client without breaking the rules.
"Because of the prohibition of public advertising we had to find a way to promote the divorce lawyer inside her own building with the clients of other law domains as the targeted group," says gkk's Stefan Magin, who worked on the campaign.
"So our creatives visited the law office and came up with the idea as soon as they stepped into the entrance hall and saw the elevator."
The cost of the campaign was minimal. The agency paid 150 euro to license the picture of the wedding couple and to bond it to the elevator in the Frankfurt office building where Stobrawe works. The creative stayed up for about a month.
The stunt took place last year, but it was such a unique, funny idea that people are still buzzing about it. On the popular ad blog Adsoftheworld.com, the stunt has generated more than 30 comments since last week. A typical alternative stunt generates fewer than half a dozen.
It works on two levels. First, the idea connects directly to the product being sold. You split up, you need a divorce lawyer. That simplicity ensures that people won't forget what's being sold.
Second, it's genuinely amusing. You can't help but smile at the door-opening reveal, which got lots of people talking about it in the office building.
"We generated a lot of word-of-mouth advertising for Sabina Stobrawe among the clients of the law firm and other lawyers," Magin says. "There were some PR requests from all over the world, mainly from Europe but also from Russia and the U.S."
Alas, it's unclear whether the couple in the photo really needed Stobrawe's services. The agency never met them.
"It is a stock picture for an image database," Magin says.
