This was a great experience. The Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst is a contemporary art gallery in Bremen, Germany. They came to my brainwashing institution asking for our help – they’re recognized internationally for the artists they exhibit and the careers they’ve helped launch, but nobody from Bremen supports them!

Working alongside the fantastic strategists Jonathan Chu and Geraldine Szabo, and the brilliant creatives Boris Grunwald, Florian Spielhofer, Penelope Abreu, Jen Maerkert, and Andreas Rasmussen, under creative directors Gerrit Kleinfeld, Nina Rieke, and Nina Jünemann, we discovered our client’s real problem, developed a clear insight, spun it into a big idea, and wound up with a creative campaign that wowed the gallery’s curator and won us a Top Dog award.

My favorite part? Testing our key human insight – if you tell somebody not to do something, they’ll definitely do it. To test it we created two posters, one that says “VISIT THIS WEBSITE”, and one that says “DON’T VISIT THIS WEBSITE.” With ridiculously amazing support for my ridiculously ridiculous tasks that have nothing at all to do with him, Hamburg’s Best PHP Programmer Jonas Franke created a pair of beautifully ridiculous web counters that feature the character GIR of Invader Zim fame doing a fancy dance (as seen below). Adding one dancing GIR per visitor allowed us to count how many people reacted to each poster. And I simply cannot imagine what these people thought when all they saw was 200+ GIRs dancing away on the screen. LOL!

And the results? Well, I told you not to read this presentation! (PDF)