Cherryflava

National Skirt Extension Project: Short skirts are a no no

Posted on 07. Apr, 2009 by Jonathan Cherry in Advertising

If you haven't heard – some rather strange ads promoting a National Skirt Extension Project have been printed [half page B&W] in this week's Sunday Times and radio ads have been flighted on 702 and Cape Talk.

There is a website, a call centre hotline [0860 111 412] and a reference to a company by the name of Oscuro as registrar of the website.
It's too late to be an April Fools joke, too expensive [our estimate is in the region of R350 000 so far] to be a hair removal cream teaser [besides - no hair removal cream would possibly be promoted in the lead up to winter] and the production quality of the various elements is too poor to be linked to a corporate client.
We called Paul at Oscuro [which is based in Pretoria - could be relevant] who stumbled over an explanation claiming Oscuro to be an ISP, but when we sniffed around we uncovered an old Oscuro brochure that claims that the company are 'creative connoisseurs'.

So – considering the media buy and the possible events that it could be linked to [elections, World Cup 2010, Easter] – our conclusion is that the whole thing is leading up to a campaign for a political party.
There is rumour that the media was purchased through an account owned by Unilever, but that may be a 'trailer breaker' done on purpose [or not].

Out of all the random copy on the website – there's one small paragraph that leads us to our startling conclusion:

Our guess, it's for COPE or the DA [or Axe deodorant, as we attempt to reveal below].

Further: Different media use alternative call centre numbers. The website's number is 0860 111 412, while the print ad in the Sunday Times uses 0860 111 408. This is a common practice used by marketers wanting to measure the success of their media schedules.

FURTHER UPDATE:

Should the Unilever media buy be a dead giveaway, our other guess is that the campaign could be for Axe deodorant. It's very much in the Axe type of style. The media buy wouldn't fit the age demographic, but maybe that was intentional to get the talk radio stations 'talking' about the whole thing. We found an old post from a couple of years back that shows it's not the first time Axe deodorant ad campaigns have made use of building signage to push a point.

Check out the new viral video that's now revealed itself.