The Tipp-Exx Bear

Hot on the heels of Old Spice for capturing imaginations and breathing life into a withering brand is the latest campaign for Tipp-Exx. It’s so brilliant that you kinda forget that Tipp-Exx is an almost obsolete product, for which there’s very little demand in a digital age….but there again, the same could be said for Old Spice.

The film – created by Parisian agency Buzzman is titled ‘NSFW. A hunter shoots a bear!’ It shows a hunter brushing his teeth before a bear lumbers into view. The 30-second long video then stops, before asking if the bear should be shot or not. Tipp-Exx won’t let you shoot the bear.

he hunter then breaks the ‘fourth wall’ and uses Tipp-Exx to earse thye word ‘shoot’ in the video title, leaving the viewer to type in what they’d like to see happen next in the blank text box. Type in ‘creates art with’ a bear, for example, and you’ll see a scene of the bear posing while the hunter paint him using a palette. Yes, you can type in ‘fuck’…and yes, that’s what they do, very amusingly.

Cleverly, while it looks like a YouTube page, it isn’t. It’s a full page flash file. It’s brilliant….and if you stall on ideas, the hunter come out and hassles you to type in something else. Here are a few that work; shoots, cuddles, dances, kisses, likes, feeds, sleeps with (it's not what you'd expect), tickles, rides, meets, is, plays football with pee kicks, smokes weed with, talks to, plays with, tipp ex, breakdances with, cuddles, goes fishing with, farts with and moonwalks with.

The science which creates success for interactive and so called ‘earned media’ is by no means certain. Not every company which has invested in such strategies has experienced viral success. It can backfire and create a negative, trying-to-hard vibe and once the customers become the channel, the client has no control over its evolution. However, when it works, it boasts a level of credibility that money can't buy. The consumer has to genuinely enjoy the campaign enough to share it, while feeling independent from the product’s game plan. That’s a tough call, but Tipp- Exx have pulled it off.



Text from: The Hospital Club