To promote the movie 'Contagion', our goal was to create an outdoor execution on a $15,000 budget that would create impressions on more that just the people passing by. We needed to create an ad that had built-in talk and sharing value.

We built giant Petri dishes, inoculated them with fungi and bacteria, and mounted them in store-front windows. Over the course of several days, the microbes grew from being nearly invisible to eerily spelling the name of the film. This is the first time an out-of-home execution has been created entirely out of living microbes. In order to accomplish this, we consulted with microbiologists and immunologists from several countries in order to select microbes that could flourish in our environment without posing any health risk whatsoever.

Contagion won its opening weekend, taking in 3 times its closest competitor at the box office. Within 1 week of the video’s release, it had registered millions of impressions, including over 210,000 views on YouTube (now over 500,000) and coverage by the CBC Toronto News at 5:30, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Today Show, The National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, Fast Company, the Huffington Post and Science Magazine, among others. It has been shared on Facebook over 41,300 times and been the subject of over 2,400 tweets.