Will Your Undies Withstand the Next Curry?

I came across these great adverts by Australian underwear brand, Bonds, today – they’re part of the company’s “Say no to Dodgy Undies” campaign which was run in Australia a few months ago.

Not just an ad campaign, the creative was launched off the back of a survey of 1100 Australian men to find out their underwear habits. The results were a little unnerving and will make me look twice at Aussie guys from now on…

• Half of the men surveyed said they sometimes wore the same pair of underpants for two or three days in a row
• Half of the men described their undergarment collection as not being “up to scratch” – purchasing undies was low on their list of priorities and they would rather purchase burgers and beers
• 25% revealed that they left the purchasing of underpants to their partner
• 70% of the men stated that they had worn women’s underwear

Survey’s are a permanent fixture in the PR toolkit – done well a survey can grab the attention of journalists and consumers and add weight to your key messages. In this case Bonds used the survey as the foundation for their creative concepts – encouraging men to ditch their dodgy underwear. Adverts were placed in sports sections and supplements of newspapers, in addition to the early news section of the papers to ensure a broad reach.

They also ran eye-catching commercial features to out forward the survey results in an entertaining way and deliver another opportunity to reach the target audience:

A simple concept executed well. No word yet on whether Aussie men have developed ‘undie pride’ or if they’re still just turning them inside out. Groan.

Will the @earlybird Catch the Advertising Worm?

Twitter is about to launch another brand-friendly revenue stream…a shopping twitter channel.

The site had given people raised eyebrows in the past as people wondered how they planned to bring in any money! Earlier this year, Twitter began to answer that question by launching ‘promoted tweets’ and ‘sponsored trending topics’.

Now they’re is upping the ante, according to Read Write Web, and have created a new account – @earlybird – that will carry brand promotional messages and special offers for those brands paying to feature on the channel.

Personally I hate being spammed on Twitter – mention a brand name and before you blink you have twenty spam followers offering you everything from inner peace to a vibrator. Biz Stone, the company’s founder, has said in the past that the company “resisted introducing a traditional web advertising model because we wanted to optimise for value before profit” and they seem to be staying true to this belief. This approach to online advertising ticks all the boxes as it’s an unobtrusive, opt-in service i.e. you have the choice as to whether you follow the channel or not. This allows Twitter to maintain the integrity of the site and avoid irritating loyal users.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter handles this shopping tweet stream. Will they divide the promotional offers by category e.g. sports offers, music offers, etc or create different accounts for different offer types? Will they target promo tweets based on keywords and users tweet history to ensure relevance? Will they present users with deals based on location? Given that there are still relatively few Twitter users in Ireland (recently estimated to be around 150,000), it’s likely that many of these promo tweets will be irrelevant otherwise.

At the time of writing this the @earlybird profile has 256 followers. Definitely one to watch.