Some of the most unconventional advertising ideas start by putting the product, message or experience somewhere it obviously doesn't belong. Dumbest Place to Put It is the tactic that turns that wrongness into the idea.
An alcohol-free beer pays for a toll. A movie waits 100 years for its audience. Dirty water turns up where bottled water should be. Here are four tactics from the Dumb Thinking Engine that make placement impossible to ignore.
- Put the product where it becomes currency
- Use the wrong format to prove the product's most important quality
- Make the context the shock, not the creative
- Put the price where it can't be ignored
1. Put the product where it becomes currency
Deploy your product in a context where it has no business functioning — and let it function perfectly.
0.0 Barriers — Heineken, Publicis Italy, 2023
Heineken needed to shift perception of its alcohol-free beer from a compromise choice to a genuine lifestyle option — the kind of drink you'd want anywhere, at any time. The dumb answer: accept cans of Heineken 0.0 as payment at road tolls. Drivers could pay their toll with alcohol-free beer, reinforcing the "drink anytime" message at exactly the moment it was most credible — behind the wheel, on the road, in a context where alcohol has no place. The placement made the product's purpose undeniable. Earned media accompanied a measurable uplift in brand relevance.
Sargento aged cheese was promoted via the World's Slowest Pizza Delivery — a real delivery site where the cheese wouldn't be ready for months, with orders tracked in real time as it aged. The wait was the product truth. Putting the delivery promise somewhere it took months to fulfil turned a limitation into the entire brand experience.
