This is one of those serendipitous things that happen in advertising. You have an idea for a potential client you’ve never talked to before. You put it together. Show it to the client. Client loves it. This happened for Dave Olson at Lamar in Milwaukee. The Milwaukee Public Library was the lucky recipient of a campaign that urges people to go offline and try reading a book once in a while. A little blurb from Dave:
This was one of those simple ideas that just pops into your head every now and then. There was no creative brief for it and we had no prior contact with the library beforehand. We showed the final designs to the library’s marketing department and they loved them. After the designs ran on our digital displays in Milwaukee for about two weeks, I discovered that they had spread like crazy all over the Internet. Libraries in Europe and Australia were contacting the Milwaukee Public Library to figure out if they could use the campaign as well.
Social media has been great for connecting us and spreading ideas, but there are some ideas too big to fit into a status update or a 140-character limit. What I like about this campaign is that it doesn’t bash social media. To attempt to dismiss Twitter, YouTube and Facebook would be a losing battle that might even make the Milwaukee Public Library seem out of touch with present-day. (Besides,JennaMarbles is f-ing hilarious.) Instead, they’ve softly invited you to get away from the computer and take part in the centuries-old tradition of books.
