The brief: To make consumers more aware of the Design Indaba brand and its core belief that through creativity comes upliftment. To convince South Africans that by thinking creatively, we can create a brighter future. And to encourage people to book for the Design Indaba Expo – an annual showcase of South African creativity and design.

Our solution: Imagine a future where creative thinking has created mass consumer products that actually help shape our world in a positive way, rather than destroy it. We wanted to make these products and their benefits seem real. We created an innovative fictitious company, DIXIV (Design Indaba 14). We conceptualised a range of products for it - like laundry balls that require neither water nor electricity to clean your clothes, or a trash can that converts trash into fuel blocks. And we advertised these products and their benefits as if they really existed.

We advertised our DIXIV products using both traditional and non-traditional channels to target a wide spectrum of consumers. We used broad-reach media like TV, press and magazines for high visibility, and placed informative editorials in national newspapers. To target online consumers, we even sold our fictional products ‘second-hand’ on a classifieds website, rewarding interested ‘buyers’ with a 10% discounts to the Expo. All media resolved in a call to action to visit a URL and sign up for a product of the future. At the website we explained that the products didn’t yet exist, but through creative thinking they could and encouraged them to book for the Expo. At the Expo, using augmented reality, we turned a conventional stand, into a store of the future. Consumers could interact with the fictitious products and see their benefits.

It was the most talked about campaign Design Indaba’s ever run. The campaign lead up to Expo generated such hype, we saw a 30% increase in exhibitors on previous years. Hundreds of people visited our classifieds’ pages. Consumers phoned the client, wanting to purchase fictional products. Expo visitors tweeted and blogged so enthusiastically, attendance tripled on day two. Our stand was accessible to 38000 people, and crowds surrounded it at any given time. During the campaign period, website traffic increased 207% compared with the same period of the previous year. We achieved a 12% Expo visitor increase on last year’s figures.