Please tell me you are at least a wee-bit curious?
Yes?
That's the idea.
This InHouse event promotion poster has three elements to pique your interest. Can you spot them?
1 - a new take on an iconic design
2 - an odd relationship between a piglet and dodgeball
3 - a mysterious secret coded message (that black and white box)
The InHouse Explanations:
BEFORE I go into the explanations, I have some bad news for all Dodgeball fans of Lusaka. Don't get your tube socks and sweat bands out just yet...the Big Man just issued a temporary Piggy Pardon and this incredible event has been postponed. Before you go and cry about it, just think of all the time you'll have to brush up on your skills (a la Napoleon Dynamite) and your Dodgeball movie trivia. Plus, that little piggy is only going to get yummier. Back to the task at hand:
1 - During the second World War the British Ministry of Information produced the now-famous "KEEP CALM and CARRY ON" propaganda poster (with the Imperial Crown of King George VI, not with a piglet) to increase morale. It was the third in a series and while 2.5 million copies were printed, the distribution was limited. The original designer is not known and the Crown copyright expired in 1989. It was virtually unknown until an original poster was discovered in a second-had bookstore in 2000 and it became and instant hit in the design community. There are new and contested efforts on behalf of a private UK company to establish trademark over the image but has been so widely distributed, used and parodied that it's difficult to say where their efforts will lead them.
While we wait for the lawyers to hammer this out, for now, it's reasonable to assume that the idea of the "Keep Calm" image is one we can all enjoy free of copyright restrictions. (It is interesting to note that the legals battle began some 11 years after it became widely popular to the point of now being cliche.)
2 - Our version of this famous poster carries the mark of a piglet and says "Keep Calm and Play Dodgeball." And while the original poster is red...this version is dodgeball red. The "fine print" finally offers an explanation: the event is a combination lunch feast (PIG ROAST) and Dodgeball Tournament. It took a few tries to figure out how to put these two very different events onto a single poster. By the time you get to reading the information, you should already be mentally assembling your team and marking the day in your planner. There is a second, equally curious version:
This version (same elements, same colors) is for a different crowd...one that will instantly recognise a dodgeball but wouldn't necessarily be drawn in by the "Keep Calm" message of the other poster.
3 - The secret code, otherwise known as a QR or Quick Response Code. This is not really a 'new' thing at all. QR codes are 2D versions of a bar code. It was first used in mid 90's by the automotive industry to track vehicles along the production line. A subsidiary of Toyota owns the patent rights but has chosen not to exercise them. In the last few years use has expanded to other industries. Most recently, it's caught on in advertising.
If you have a smart phone, you can quickly and easily download a QR app and your phone can 'read' the code and take you directly to the website (or in this case the Blue Moon Facebook "event" page) where you can instantly access even MORE information about the event. In MadMen advertising lingo, the QR Code can take a consumer deeper into the 'conversion funnel.' Which means a company can get the observer that much closer to being a customer/client by eliminating the need to remember a website address, a phone number, a company name, or...you get the idea. Just scan and click and you're right were we want you: deep in the conversion funnel.
That sounds unpleasant but it's actually pretty darn cool. It's a first for Lusaka -- even cooler.
