‘The Fun Theory’ is a new campaign created by DDB Stockholm for Volkswagen to promote it’s ‘Blue Technologies’ brand.
Through a series of experiments, which currently include ‘Piano Stairs’ and ‘The World’s Deepest Bin’, the campaign aims to ‘change peoples behaviour for the better’. The piano video link arrived in our inboxes last week, just two days after it was posted on youtube, and has so far notched up 2.8 million views on youtube. Impressively, this puts it up there with recent classic adverts such as the Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’ advert (3.6 million views) and Sony Bravia’s ‘Balls’ (1.8 million views).
The website is presented as a blog-style showcase of everyday-people’s inventions with a call to action to enter your own ideas into a competition, consequently providing the content for the site and a limitless shelf-life.
Volkswagen’s association with the campaign is played down, yet it comes through as the hero, in a similar way to the Chalkbot campaign by Nike featured here a while back, both of which succeed at engaging people with a genuinely interesting idea minus the hard-sell.
Clever stuff.
The Lungs of Good Design 