Advertising vs Product

“For seven days a piano has been suspended above a car. Every time a prediction about an uncontrollable event was fulfilled, one of the ropes was cut.”

The Russian insurance company Intouch opted for a different kind of campaign while publicizing its External Factors insurance. The premise was simple: “what does safety depend on?”; each rope symbolized all the situations we cannot predict and put our cars in jeopardy and, most of the times, we are the ones who have to pay for the damage. Not if we are InTouch’s clients.

During the seven days the piano was suspended above a car, anyone could send one prediction and wait for it to happen, or not. The events were diversified, from predicting that the temperature in Moscow reached the 21ºC or simply that Barcelona would get to the Champions League’s final. The idea was to show that we cannot predict all the external factors that can damage our vehicles, but we can be insured so we don’t have to be worried about them.

In that sense, we cannot say that InTouch’s idea was particularly out of the blue: it had a point and showed a bit of their message and their product – an insurance against all the external factors which damage our cars and how we are not responsible for them; be insured is the only way of preventing unwanted bills.  By the by, it even got it touch with possible clients and caught the attention of social networks, spreading the word faster than in any other medium (one of the prediction was that the last rope would be cut if 100 people tweeted the sentence “fall, piano, fall! #carvspiano” in a 59 minutes time. There were 100 tweets in 15 minutes). It didn’t tell people directly about their need of having an insurance, but showed them (giving that everything was broadcasted live).

Even so, the campaign got more attention for itself than the product t was being sold; people were excited for having the ability to participate in such activity, maybe even predict one of the events which would result in the smashed car. You can even ask for one piece of the broken piano and car if you like, just sending an email to the company.

All in all, we can never be sure how tour campaigns are going to result. We can have the most creative idea and it fails for it not being so connected to the product that we forget what product we are talking about. Probably, most of the people following the events were not even aware of the fact that it was a campaign for an insurance company, and only noticed it in the end, when everything was already finished.

In a way, Intouch did what needed to catch attention: it created a different campaign which got talked about in the social networks so much that everyone knew what was happening. Only by the end it inserted it in the company’s objectives. Did the message got to all of the people involved the same way, or most of them just cared about the event and not the product?

You can check all the information and get familiar with the campaign in the website Car vs Piano.

Inês Maria