9.4 Case Study: Peperami

Peperami, one of the largest UK consumer brands, is a pork sausage snack manufactured by Unilever in Germany and Britain. Launched over fifteen years ago, the brand was in the hands of creative agency Lowe since its conception until August 2009, when Unilever announced that it was going to drop the agency and work with Idea Bounty to crowdsource the concept for their new campaign.

In the past, The Animal, a crazed, masochistic sausage character, represented the brand in advertising communications. The character is well known and much loved for his uninhibited, unapologetic, and politically incorrect behavior. For the last fifteen years, he has been a central part of every Peperami campaign.

However, Unilever felt that after fifteen years with the same agency, the Peperami brand and The Animal character needed an injection of fresh ideas for the brand’s next print and television advertisements. Enter Idea Bounty.

Idea Bounty was involved in the writing of the brief from the beginning of the project. The brief was very specific with its requirements and stipulated that the winning idea had to be able to support the development of scripts and storyboards. This ensured that the ideas submitted would be well thought-out and of a high quality.

The brief also included examples of the past Peperami campaigns as well as templates for storyboards and scripts.

As a reward, a bounty of $10,000 was set with the option of an extra $5,000 for extreme creativity.

The Idea Bounty team also produced a full-page print ad promoting the brief, which was published in the United Kingdom’s Campaign Magazine as well as on online banners displayed on various marketing- and advertising-related sites across the globe.

Furthermore, the brief attracted a considerable amount of PR (public relations), with extensive coverage both online and offline, due to the controversial nature of crowdsourcing in advertising at the time of the brief running.

The Idea Bounty team was also greatly involved in the final selection process, ensuring an effective idea filtering system. In addition, an idea selection workshop held with Unilever assisted in the selection of the final idea.

The brief closed a full two months after launch and in total received 1,185 submissions. This was an extraordinarily large amount of ideas considering every entry met the basic requirements laid out in the brief.

Submissions made by creatives were of exceptional quality. Overall the hosting of the brief was a massive success. The large amount of quality submissions was due to the brief coming from a well-known brand with an engaging problem. The cherry on top was the bounty offered that encouraged people to invest their time and energy in their submission.

After much deliberation and due to the quality of submissions, Idea Bounty and Unilever announced two outstanding winning ideas.