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The Business goes ballistic for iSite Media campaign

iSite recently launched its new highly targeted outdoor media planning service. And in an effort to show it off to media agencies and marketing professionals, its new agency The Business took a very literal approach to the concept of shooting an ad. 

The Business, which won the iSite account in a competitive pitch in June, was responsible for developing a campaign concept and producing all elements of the B2B campaign, including the surprisingly entertaining launch video starring OMD’s Andrew Reinholds and Rebecca Bradley, which was directed by Blu Stevens and played to a 200+ strong audience who gathered at the Auckland’s Cloud for the launch event. 

As James Hurman wrote a while back, creative magazine ads are few and far between these days, but, to its credit, The Business tried something a bit different to drum home the highly targeted outdoor message and decided to shoot 3,500 magazine inserts with a .223 assault rifle at a shooting range. 

“It was one of those ideas that sounded great in the boardroom and when everyone agreed we had to figure out how the hell to do it,” says Ben Cochrane, managing director. “It wasn’t going to feasible to shoot each one of the 4,000 ads individually, but we didn’t want to fake it with die cuts or anything that wasn’t authentic.”

The team mocked up batches of 200 reams of 180GSM paper and shot those from 50 metres. 

“The problem was that the exit wound was always too big. We blew it to smithereens, so we had to find the exact amount of pages that got the best bullet hole from the first page to the last,” he says. 

The team then built a special device to hold 163 reams of paper and shot them twice from 50m away. The ads were then inserted into the September/October edition of NZ Marketing magazine, with a belly band on the cover that opened to that page. 

The campaign also featured target shooting digital banners, website landing pages and DM pieces comprising of USB bullets. 

“The proposition of highly targeted outdoor media developed by The Business was bang on the money,” says Rupert Fenton, iSite’s market manager. “We were targeting the advertising industry – a very critical audience. The campaign was executed in a way that was engaging and exciting, delivering the impact we needed. The anecdotal feedback from the event and media so far has been great.” 

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