Leaflets…

By Tom Messett

They’re not particularly interesting, and nor, if I’m completely honest, are the people who hand them out. Some dress in funny outfits but they don’t attract a crowd, they certainly never have people clamouring to snatch the piece of low-end marketing collateral from their hand and most leaflets that are handed out end up in the bin or dropped on the floor very close to where they were handed out.

Men handing out leaflets certainly don’t have blog posts written about them, they don’t get videos on YouTube and they are not something you tell your friends about in the park later on.

Or are they?

These guys were promoting the Plaza shopping centre by dancing their way up and down Oxford Street in seemingly spontaneous (but amusing and well choreographed) routines handing out leaflets like the one below after every performance:

Plaza Leaflet 1 Plaza Leaflet 2

This certainly disrupted my Saturday afternoon and there was quite a crowd gathered when I ran into the dancing builders near Oxford Circus, I even videoed the dance and showed it to my friends later, many of them work near Oxford St and had heard about these guys already, so great offline WOM!

So this was a great way for Plaza to disrupt the act of handing out leaflets by making it more social then? Well almost…

The leaflets themselves are a bit dry, almost an anti-climax, there is nothing wrong with them but the dancing builders could have done something more fun and taken this idea much further, instead of a leaflet why not hand out some Plaza-branded builders hats or vests with the leaflet content printed on the inside, it would be great to walk along Oxford St to see all these people wandering along with yellow builders hats!

So it was good but could have been better then? Well almost… You see the first thing I notice when looking at the leaflet is a link to the Plaza’s Facebook page with the offer of free Pizza, great, I’ll take a look, only this page doesn’t work.

This is what I see:

Plaza FAIL

Oh dear…

This seems to be the primary purpose of the promotion; to drive traffic to this owned location that doesn’t exist!

The only site we could find (after some decent searching on our part), was this Plaza Oxford Street group page which, at the time of writing, only has two members!

It’s a shame as the dancing builders were great, I am sure they drove some decent footfall to the Plaza and created some great offline WOM, it’s a pity the follow through online was poor.

Anyone can make mistakes, but this kind of thing – now five days in and counting – is just plain silly.

When it comes to Facebook, we’d recommend taking a look at this deck we found on Slideshare for some handy pointers
:)

How To Set Up A Facebook Fan Page For Business

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Brought into the world on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 and filed under 1000thoughts, Case Studies.

  • Nicola

    Epic dancing! Great that they can draw in the crowds, but shame they didn’t follow it through with a more interesting/eye catching leaflet and at the very least linking people to a site that works!

  • mollyflatt

    I love this. I love builders. Bizarre that people forget that on and offline exist in parallel – because we're real people as well as social surfers. Join it up, lads, join it up.

  • http://philcooper.posterous.com/ Phil Cooper

    Yes, great activation on the street but oh dear, massive fail online…

  • Dagmar

    Yes, it depends on how the leaflet is writ and pic'd. Crisp and nice creative content is key, king, crucial, in everything. A little paper leaflet can be great.

  • Geoff Bannister

    The leafleters could have taken a leaf (or leaflet) out of the Covent Garden performers, who have someone going round during the performance to collect donations, not just at the end, as people tend to move off very quickly. Plus maybe a 'builder' at the back with a wad of leaflets and a sandwich board, so people could collect a vest/hat/leaflet etc if they need to leave before the end of the act.

    Maybe 1000heads could produce its own guide to on-street WOM, and stage its own 'West End' production in which it gives out the guides? And film the event of course. You might catch a few CEOs/managers out on their lunchbreaks and get a bit of extra business. You seem to be a theatrical bunch!