January 22, 2019
Jessie Schiewe is a journalist in California and the editor of a new online publication dedicated to weird news called OK Whatever. She ordered up a matte label sticker sheet in an 8-bit branding style with the names of her publication and website. She used them as branding on Kodak slides that she then sent around the globe as part of an innovative, yet vintage, organic advertising campaign for OK Whatever.
And it worked! As we learned from Schiewe, the campaign was so not whatever when it came to results. "It has helped us accrue clicks, and gain readers worldwide," she says. "I've even had people email me after finding the slides on college campuses and in coffee shops. It's kind of awesome that traditional methods of marketing can still be effective today."
These slides traveled from Peru to Washington state, from South Africa to Nashville, from Mexico City to Paris. She told all of her friends around the world to place the slides around their cities and to send pictures back to her. You can check out some of the snaps on OK Whatever's Instagram Story that has a whole bunch of awesome user-generated photos of the slides being left in innovative and weird spots (like a doggy-bag dispenser and on a tree in Golden Gate Park). So much fun for the participants, and great to have stickers out in the wild.
OK Whatever is all about embracing and elevating the weirdness in people, so it made a lot of sense to have an original, wacky advertising campaign when they launched in September 2018. "It's not everyday that you walk around your city and find old family photos taken between the 1950s to early-1990s," Schiewe said. "We figured anyone who would be interested enough to pick up one of the slides and check out the website is probably weird enough to dig the kinds of stuff we're reporting on."
What a great brand play to drive traffic and build awareness for this startup media property. In a really crowded online space for all sorts of news, from politics to weirdness, it's crucial to stand out in a unique, not at-all-whatever way, and OK Whatever really helped build buzz with this sticker-driven campaign.
We'd like to thank Jessie for reaching out to us with this story. We love getting these emails and photos and then sharing them out to the world.