By Darren Gilbert

Taking place at Westcott Primary School in Diep River, Cape Town, the activation made use of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip placed in a special lunchbox. The microchip allowed mothers to record a message for their child to help them get through their first day at school. At school, the kids took their lunchbox to the SASKO Care Station where they were able to watch the video message while eating their lunch.

Can you tell us more about this campaign?

The thought behind this campaign was around the care that SASKO puts into their products and how that parallels with the care that people have who cook for their families.

We do quite a lot of work with brands in the food space and one of the things you learn is that parents and mums and the cooking they do, they really put a lot of love into it.

It fits in nicely with where the brand is trying to take itself in terms of the care it puts into its work.

SASKO recently relaunched their brand and they have many different products. Historically, the brands were run separately but now they have pulled them all together and are creating an overarching brand position.

This was a way to drive home that new brand positioning.

What were your reasons for using RFID technology in this campaign?

With this brief, we started with the consumer insight, which is the expression of love that a parent has for their child and how they pour that into their food or lunch.

From there, we asked ourselves, what could be an interesting way of demonstrating that? And we thought about the idea of the lunchbox being the expression of the mother’s love.

Today, how would a mother be able to send a love letter? She probably wouldn’t write it out but rather do it in a video. So how do we then match up that video with a kid? RFID was the solution that popped out for us.

The tech is often seen as a means to an end. In this campaign, because it is something quite surprising and delights people, we do not treat it as only a means to an end. It delivers on the consumer insight, while also delighting people.

How excited are you about the opportunity to use tech in any campaign you do?  

It is what gets me up in the morning.

One of the things I love about what Liquorice does is we have futureproofed our positioning because, from an innovation point of view, there is always something new that will come up and will surprise and delight people.

We also hire people who have that similar passion for innovation. So we are lucky because then our work tends to feel quite fresh. Whereas if you are in a particular traditional medium, it’s often quite easy to get stuck in a rut of producing the same thing.

Do you think tech can ever be overused? Essentially, doing tech for the sake of doing it?

Yes, definitely.

As I previously said, you really need to start with the consumer insight.

There are digital agencies that have grown from a tech background who may miss the consumer insight and do tech for the sake of tech. There are also traditional ad agencies who treat technology and innovation as a second cousin.

You need to give both breathing room and oxygen, as they are equally important.

What was the most challenging part about using technology in this campaign?

Because we are always innovating, we have to put extra effort into making sure we test stuff before it gets into client’s and consumer’s hands. We actually have a full quality assurance team at Liquorice to test every piece of tech we deploy.

In this campaign, everything actually worked surprisingly well.

However, we did have quite a short window for this campaign because we wanted to do it close to when schools started and we needed a school to be open to do it.

What you see in the video is the actual first day at school. It wasn’t a set-up or anything.

We filmed it on the first day of school and we had to turn it around with no hiccups in just a week. I would love to have had the luxury of a six-month shoot but, in digital, you don’t have that kind of time.

Will you be expanding your use of RFID to other campaigns? Are you looking at using different technology?

SASKO has a whole schools programme, so now it’s about figuring out how we take this and roll it out more.

This is the first big digital activation campaign that the brand has done in the last few years. So doing something like this, which gets a lot of consumer attention, gives SASKO confidence to say that, actually, digital works and we can take some risks and create something that stands out.

You can watch the activation here.

For more information, visit www.liquorice.co.za. Alternatively, connect with them on Facebook or on Twitter.