Creativity in Public Relations

I’m a big fan of “going to the peeps” and Dell just launched a very cool summer music festival promotion to show-off the company’s new line of colour PCs.  Hitting the festival scene isn’t easy – there is a lot of competition out there and people are already a bit weery of the corporate world coming in on their turf.  The guys at Dell seemed to have been very aware of this fact and have come up with a cool campaign that checks off all the boxes.

Box 1:  Relevance to a music festival crowd.  At the core of the campaign sits Brooklyn-based artist Mike Ming who performs inside the dome with cool airbrush tattoos for visitors, helps people create their own designs and adds some flair to the outside of the Dome with an incredible canvas visual.  Mike is connected to Dell through the company offering limited edition cool PCs that he has gone to town on the outside – amazing designs to brighten up any PC.  The Mike Ming editions are awesome.

Box 2: Free stuff.  Inside the Dell Dome people can create a digital mix tapes by selecting from some pre-loaded songs, get their hair done like their favourite rock god. get some cool Mike Ming-designed tattoos or get into some retro heat iron transfer action for shirts and bags. 

Box 3: Downplay the corporate-ness.  Dell is there having fun, not selling product.  Nothing is worse than a corporate brand trying to sell stuff in an environment where people are just hanging out with their friends.

Box 4: Engaging campaign site.  The Dell Summer Rocks website has everything you want on a site – cool content to see what you are missing by not being at one of these festivals, photos of cool people hanging out, ability to create your own mix tape which sends you a unique link to download the mixtape or embed code to your MySpace or blog (solid) and of course the chance to win tickets to one of the upcoming festivals. 

Box 5: Buzz-worth kick-off.  Not sure living down under how much buzz the launch part of the campaign generated, but it sounds cool at least.  On the first day of the campaign big colorful Dell towels showed up on beaches in six major US cities, showing off the new Dell color range of its PCs.  Each towel had a hangtag announcing the new Dell Summer Rocks campaign and sweepstakes (win flights to Austin for the end of the campaign music festival), so connects the campaign with the towel.

There are probably more boxes but this at least gives you a sense of the pre-thinking that is needed to ensure a campaign fires on all cyllinders.  Hats off to Dell for a great creative campaign that is entertaining, engaging and continues to build the Dell personality in a fun way. Watch some of the fun below.