Pouring one giant
cup of morning joe
Coffee pot 50 feet up streams java into a huge cup
By Toni Fitzgerald
Sep 18, 2009
You’re walking down the street one bright morning when you suddenly find yourself staring at a sight that seems to defy gravity.
You see a giant coffee carafe suspended in the air, some 50 feet off the ground. A 7-foot coffee cup stands below it.
Between the carafe and the cup is a long stream of black coffee. It looks as though some invisible hand is pouring coffee from the carafe into the cup.
There is no invisible hand, of course. The carafe, coffee and cup are a stunt, a very visually arresting one, to promote free coffee being given away by McDonald’s in Canada.
The stream of coffee is actually a curved lamppost. The faux carafe is attached to the top of the post, around the light, and the cup, brown with the signature yellow McDonald’s “M,” is wrapped around the bottom.
“For two weeks they were giving away free coffee. Our job was to say it in a big way with ads that got noticed, encouraging people to grab a cup,” says Bryan Collins, vice president and creative director at Cossette, the Vancouver-based agency that came up with the idea.
The agency wanted to target morning commuters on trains, in cars and on the street with an alternative element that would also showcase McDonald’s new cup design.
After playing around with the idea of simply constructing a giant coffee cup, it decided to go with the image of a freshly poured cup of joe instead, employing the lamppost.
Cossette collaborated on the project with Dyna Graphics, a Vancouver-based firm that specializes in large-format printing.
The biggest challenge in constructing a carafe floating 50 feet high in the sky was making sure the dangling dispenser wouldn’t kill anyone if it fell to the ground.
“We could be sued if it fell,” points out Rob Sweetman, also a Cossette VP/creative director. “We looked at inflatable balloons, but we decided on a light, hollowed-out foam with a vice that attached to the head of the post.”
Though the carafe was light, it wasn’t easy to get it the full 50 feet in the air. A crane had to be used in the three cities where the stunt ran, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.
The crane got a lot of use: The carafe and cup had to be installed anew each day, as the cities would not allow the props to remain in place overnight during the two-week campaign.
“We also didn’t want to leave them out for vandals,” adds Sweetman.
The stunt worked because it was an image that stuck with people. It was an attention grabber, something completely unexpected but so creative that you can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of turning a lamppost into a coffee stream.
The stunt took place over two weeks last spring, and it received lots of attention. The Globe & Mail ran a picture, lots of marketing blogs picked it up, and McDonald’s saw good results based on the carafe promotion and several others that ran throughout Canada.
Nationally, the fast food restaurant gave away more than 6.1 million coffees during the free trial period, up 75 percent over the same time a year earlier and 27 percent above its internal forecast.
This was not the only use of a giant coffee cup for an alternative media campaign this year, or even the only one staged by McDonald's. Earlier this year, the fast food restaurant put up a billboard in Times Square in New York City featuring a giant floating spigot that appeared to be pouring coffee into a cup below.
And a "giant spills" promotion for Bounty towels earlier this year deployed what appeared to be a giant cup of coffee that had toppled on its side, spilling the brown liquid all over an NYC sidewalk.
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