PILOT Pen Campaign

In the PILOT pen campaign, planned for the transition between summer vacation and the new school year
and executed on our mobile billboards, the MobiJets, a gremlin played a certain role.
That is, a glitch. That is, a mischievous sprite.

A sprite, that is a gremlin, that is a glitch. Before you look carefully at the photo and search for the effects of its work, read about the PILOT pen campaign, because as rarely happens, an accidental error fit perfectly into the campaign context and the sense of humor and openness of the people in PILOT's marketing department turned the mistake into a very nice additional action.

The promotional advertising campaign for pens was planned for the end of summer vacation and the beginning of the school year. It was addressed to students and had two four-day phases in five cities: Warsaw, Krakow, Wrocław, Poznań, and Gdańsk. With such assumptions, choosing MobiJets is obvious, as the precisely selected target group did not assume the presence of advertising for a month or even two weeks, which usually happens in classic OOH campaigns.
An integral part of the advertising campaign was a contest, conducted on the pilotpen.pl website, which the graphics invited participation in, presenting the possibilities of the advertised pens: write - erase - correct.

And that's exactly it.

Student reality, that is a typo, that is a detail to be erased with PILOT's magic pen,
in the printed form of the graphics is the work of a gremlin that settled somewhere between the preview file (which was correct) and the one sent by the agency for printing (which was wrong). The typo was noticed by our team mounting graphics on MobiJets, which were supposed to hit the road the next day...

Our Production Department rushed to the rescue with quick action.
We proposed several production correction ideas to PILOT that saved the already printed decorations, while PILOT quickly developed an additional contest action and prizes
for finding the typo. The hero of the advertisement itself came to help: since we're talking about a magic pen, let's reference it! A quickly printed sticker appeared on the decorations, which encouraged
finding the error and winning a prize.

We remembered a situation from several years ago, when a few days before Christmas, the long-awaited greeting cards arrived (those were the days of sending traditional cards).
The cards were beautiful and the greeting text referred to the fact of providing financial support to one
of the elementary schools and was written as if the wishes were written by a child.
They were beautiful, too bad that... with a spelling error and that there was absolutely
no time to print new ones.
When we calmed down, red markers went into action. Do you remember the way the Polish teacher
corrected errors? Exactly. Two characteristic red lines underlining “rzyczenia” appeared
within an hour, and all recipients were convinced of the purposefulness of this very nice trick.
The conclusions are therefore that gremlins were, are and will be, and that presence of mind and sense of humor are distinguished
by a certain effectiveness in fighting them.