Title	THE UNIVERSAL TYPEFACE
Brand	BIC DEUTSCHLAND
Product/Service	BIC CRISTAL BALLPOINT PEN
Category	A09. USE OF SOCIAL IN A PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGN
Entrant Company	DDB GERMANY DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY
Advertising Agency	DDB GERMANY DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY
Production Company	MEDIA MONKS BV PA Hilversum, THE NETHERLANDS

Name	Company	Position
Eric Schoeffler	DDB Group Gmbh	Cco
Dennis May	DDB Group Gmbh	Managing Director Creative
Jan Propach	DDB Group Gmbh	Creative Director
Dominika Zajac/Christian Bueltmann/Fabian Jung	DDB Group Gmbh	Art Director
Tobias Hecking	DDB Group Gmbh	Copywriter
Sönke Bruns	DDB Group Gmbh	Account Manager
Jouke Vuurmans	Media Monks BV
Joris Pol	Media Monks BV
Quinten Beek	Media Monks BV
Nicolas Mollien	Media Monks BV
Matthijs Klip	Media Monks BV
Willem Baas	Media Monks BV
Elbert Niezen/Jorge Garcia	Media Monks BV
Maxwell Reed	Media Monks BV
Hendrik/Jan De Harder/Nigel Manson	Media Monks BV
Richard Mulder	Media Monks BV
Johan Holwerda	Media Monks BV
Chase Sillevis	Media Monks BV
Matthew Elworthy	Media Monks BV

The Brief

With over 100 Billion items produced by Bic, the Cristal ballpoint pen is the best selling pen ever. It can be called the world’s pen – the universal pen. Yet this pen is so universal, such a commodity that it hardly gets the attention it deserves. We were tasked to change that, especially in the design-savvy community on the web, where the concept of writing by hand seems kind of counter-intuitive at first glance.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

The idea: If there’s a universal pen, there should be a universal handwriting. Time for an experiment. On www.theuniversaltypeface.com users, targeted on design and typography blogs and on their social media outlets, enter their own handwriting, which then becomes part of the universal typeface – an ever-changing, evolving font that can be downloaded at various stages of development. In its pure form consisting of all contributions and in special versions moulded from a huge set of demographic data. In essence it’s the first crowd sourced cross-section of human handwriting. As many people from as many countries as possible should participate.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

So far more than 1,7 million letters have been entered into the system by people from more than 140 countries. Reputable press including time magazine, Washington Times, NBC, Huffington Post and Wired reported on the project. Like today’s world the resulting typeface is dynamic and continuously changing in a very hands on, direct way – the universal typeface made possible by the universal pen.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

If it isn’t there already, handwriting is just about to get a problem of relevance. Why? Because of the web. So we needed to find a way to show how the web might add to handwriting and at the same time give handwriting an additional dimension that’s meaningful to the web and could only be realized thanks to the web. That’s why we used the unifying dimension of the web and started bringing people together in real time right where they are: in front of their computer with their smartphone ready at hand.