It’s a sign – creative church advertising

I was reading Media Post yesterday and came across this great campaign by the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, the oldest in the U.S. for their fund raising block party. I thought it was so clever and fun I had to talk about it here. Even though I’m not that religious, I probably would have tried to go to this party, just because of the advertising, so you see how much I thought it was good.

They put teaser images all over the city of people showing typical, household objects that show rock-related “signs”. One woman holds up a piece of toast with an electric guitar burned into it, a guy holds up a cat with the “rock on” hand drawn out of the white fur on its head, etc. For a church that damned rock and roll as “devil’s music”, this is pretty cool (the party’s also sponsored by Miller Lite, by the way). After a while the teaser images got a large sign on them explaining: “It’s a Sign. Make the Pilgrimage.”

I went to their website and was greeted with some pretty good music, which I kept on while I worked. They had a section where you could send online invitations to your friends bearing the “sign” images, a “Map your trek” section, that was really just a map to the Basilica, but I thought was a clever way to name it, and a contest where you could enter your “Pilgrimage” story. But the best thing about the whole campaign, in my opinion, was that Olson, the agency responsible for this campaign “used hypersonic sound cannons on the streets of downtown that fired audio messages at specific individuals in a crowd so that only those individuals hear the ‘audio apparitions’ we were projecting. Certain people would hear the music from the block party’s line-up in their heads, and the message, ‘If you hear this, it’s a sign.’” Genius.