Ad of the day (5.28.12)


I think this might be my favorite viral marketing campaign ever. Every April there is a national holiday in Amsterdam called Queen’s Day. It’s a pretty unique festival that takes place over two days throughout the entire city. Basically, everything shuts down and people just party in the street. However, people party so much, and it is so crowded, that drunk men start to relieve themselves in the canal – which is bad. Fed up with urine in the city’s canals, water supplier Waternet hired advertising agency Achtung! to come up with a pretty clever way to get people to pee in the toilet, and not the canal.

They built brightly colored urinals and set them up all over the city.  Each urinal contained four stalls that were connected to a digital screen. Once you had four people ready to pee, it was basically a race to see who could pee the fastest, and the most. The winner got bragging rights amongst all of their friends. Furthermore, the one person that peed the most throughout the holiday would win their water taxes back.

The campaign was a smash hit and turned out to be one of the most visited attractions during the Queen’s Day celebration. It’s unknown as of this posting if they were successful in their cause. The only question I have is – why don’t we do stuff like this in the states?

2 responses to “Ad of the day (5.28.12)

  1. That must have made an impact, had to of!
    Really clever…
    But stalls like this would never make their way to the US, not without walls.

    • Forget the walls – something like this would NEVER happen in the states. Even if they were enclosed rooms.

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