THE IMMORAL OFFER

TitleTHE IMMORAL OFFER
BrandARROW ELECTRONICS
Product/ServiceARROW ELECTRONICS
Category A01. Corporate Reputation & Communication
Entrant Company OGILVY GERMANY Frankfurt, GERMANY
Advertising Agency OGILVY GERMANY Frankfurt, GERMANY
Production Company MARKENFILM Berlin, GERMANY
Production Company 2 NHB Berlin, GERMANY
Production Company 3 PLAYROOM STUDIOS Frankfurt, GERMANY
Credits
Name Company Position
Dr. Stephan Vogel Ogilvy Germany Chief Creative Officer
Lars Huvart Ogilvy Germany Creative Director
Peter Strauss Ogilvy Germany Creative Director
Patrick Willomitzer/Christian Kuzman/Ute Sonntag Ogilvy Germany Art Director
Lars Huvart/Holger Schupp/David Simons Ogilvy Germany Copywriter
Roland Stauber/Jorinde Gessner/Ariane Sketcher Ogilvy Germany Account Management
Martina Diederichs Ogilvy Germany Art Buying
Hugo Meyer/Chad Bontrager Arrow Electronics/Inc. Graphic Designer
Mathias Koehler/Christoph Matthies Ogilvy Germany Avid
Claudia Vaternahm Ogilvy Germany Agency Producer
Hagen Decker Markenfilm Berlin Director
Anne Beutel Markenfilm Berlin Editor
Thomas Bartl Markenfilm Berlin Producer
Tanja Haering Markenfilm Berlin Dop
Raul Geisler Playroom Studios Sound Design/Composer
Rich Kylberg/Hugo Meyer/Chad Bontrager Arrow Electronics/Inc. Advertiser's Supervisor

The Campaign

Despite being one of the largest electronic component suppliers in the world, Arrow Electronics is still mostly known to Insiders – not the general public. While the world admires rock stars, actors, models and athletes, they don’t know the people who make their lives better – innovators. To promote our online content hub, the “Heroes of Innovation” online gallery, we used the above insight - the media’s love for celebrity culture – to hijack the Eurovision Song Contest. Right as the craze about the upcoming Song Contest and Germany’s candidate, Ann Sophie, reached its peak, we ran a full-page ad in Germany’s newspaper FAZ newspaper. The ad offered Ann Sophie one million euros, if she sang her song – with new lyrics that were written by us. We turned her love song „Black smoke“ into an ode for heroes of innovation around the world. As planned, the celebrity-crazed media immediately picked up the story. Germany’s largest newspaper even called it Arrow’s ‘immoral’ one million euro offer. Ann Sophie answered publicly, starting a nation-wide conversation about why innovators are left out of the spotlight.

The Brief

The goal was to make a big, but rather unknown B2B brand famous.

Execution

The first thing we did was creating our “Heroes of Innovation” Gallery, an online content hub that celebrates top innovators. To raise awareness for our online platform, we hijacked the world’s largest music live show - The Eurovision song contest – by running a provocative print ad in the FAZ newspaper that offered Germany’s ESC contestant, Ann Sophie, one million euros if she changed the lyrics of her love song to those written by us – an ode to innovators around the world. We knew our print ad would elicit a response from Ann Sophie’s PR team, and when they responded to our ad, we kicked off our online and offline campaign to take full advantage of the PR buzz. What followed was a mix of banner ads, special format online ads, Twitter/Facebook activities, and classical formats, like TVC and print ads. All efforts directed the viewer to our online hub.

As planned, the celebrity-obsessed media immediately picked up the story. Germany’s largest newspaper went as far as calling it Arrow’s ‘immoral’ one million euro offer. The campaign generated 217.4 million free contacts worth 4.5 million Euros in media spend. During the campaign period Posts & Tweets mentioning Arrow were up 930% and traffic on the content hub rose by 359%.

The Strategy

Since our entire campaign pitted celebrity culture vs. the people who truly change the world (innovators and inventors), it was only right that our PR stunt found a way to merge both worlds. Our target was anyone who was interested in celebrity culture. Keeping that in mind, we picked an event that we knew they’d be watching, the Eurovision Song Contest, to execute our stunt. Every day, our target audience uses devices (smartphone, lap top etc.) that use Arrow technology, but they have no idea what Arrow Electronics does, let alone, that they exist.