Volontaire’s methodology is built on the belief that companies and organizations have lost control of their brands and should cooperate with their customers instead of disturbing them with one-way-messages. In order to prove that point, we needed a guinea-pig: one of the world’s largest and most successful brands.
In March of 2009, the following news was spread through the world:
“Volontaire is a small agency with big ambitions in Stockholm, Sweden.
Recently, they gave three interns a mission.
1. Pitch on Adidas worldwide.
2. Win the account.
3. Within three weeks.
Why? Because according to Adidas, Impossible is Nothing.”
In order to show how Volontaire works, the interns Malin Berg, Henrik Bohman and Elisabeth Fischer got three weeks to win one of the world’s largest advertising accounts, Adidas, with their own brand promise as hostage.
Armed only with a blog, a Twitter account and an open invitation to visitors to contribute to the process, they created a platform for collective creativity and transparency in everything from product development to advertising concepts.
Three weeks passed quickly and were filled with research, store checks, interviews with legendary Swedish ad people like Bo Rönnberg and Björn Rietz, hundreds of published advertising ideas with direct feedback from the visitors and lastly, an integrated, global concept with the own channel, adidas.tv, at the center.
The thought behind the concept is simple and also stems from Volontaire’s methodology: by re-allocating economic resources from bought media space to the development of strong ideas that distribute themselves, funds are released to implement various large scale activities simultaneously in different parts of the world.
In less than three weeks, the blog attracted more than 12 000 unique visitors from 86 countries, who, on average, spent 3:16 minutes on the site. Articles in Campaign and Brand Republic named it the world’s first ”Twitch” (Twitter Pitch) and judged it to potentially change the way agencies compete for accounts. More than 100 blogs from all over the world mentioned the project as unique and innovative and about 1 000 tweets helped to spread the word. This proves the economic and relevant effect of storytelling online.
Moreover, our conviction became very apparent: that companies have completely lost control over their brands.
