Located in offices, gyms and public spaces throughout New Zealand, Spring NZ coolers are once again creating water cooler talk in the traditional sense thanks to NZ-based advertising agency Colenso BBDO.
To promote and publicise the television series Vampire Diaries, they have filled Spring NZ’s water coolers with ‘blood’, which should draw the curious (and perhaps the morbid) back to chat around the water dispenser.
“The blood was a special recipe,” said Rob Linkhorn of Colenso BBDO. “We thought about using soup, dye or tomato sauce – in the end we found a good mix of food colouring, cocoa and corn starch. It made for the perfect brew. So yes, you could drink it. We didn’t want to poison the keen passer-by, but it tasted like watery cocoa.”
It’s quenching the current thirst for vampire fiction but I can’t help thinking that the stunt is also a homage to the cooler. In today’s flurry of email communication, standing about the cooler and chatting may be considered somewhat retro, along with Bakerlite plastics and cheese and pineapple on sticks, but the fact Colenso BBDO chose water coolers as the springboard for the campaign means that the physical water cooler hasn’t been entirely severed from office talk traditions.
“As with any advertising, ‘talkability’ makes for great leverage,” said Rob, “so yes, water cooler talk hits the mark quite well. I think originality was the key to success, and nailing the look of the blood in the cooler made it work.”
The campaign was the creative work of Sarah Longworth of Colenso BBDO, under company directors Nick Worthington and Levi Slavin.
Rachel Delahaye is editor of Cooler Innovation magazine. Subscribe here.
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