It all started with a short meeting held several months ago at The Code’s Bangkok office.
ITB has kindly offered to sponsor some advertising space for The Code, and the group were trying to decide where it could promote its work on protecting children from sex tourism.
“ITB will be full of advertising, where can we put an advert that will make people pay attention to our work”.
“Well, how about the bathrooms?”
From that initial meeting the members of the team worked on several designs for a small poster that would be placed in each of the XXXX bathrooms at the ITB conference.
The brief for the poster was that it had to be eye catching, easily read within 30 seconds, and let people know where to find out more information.
Agreeing the final design of the poster took many hours of work, but The Code team got immediate feedback on the bright colourful poster during the first day of ITB. Several visitors stopping at The Code’s booth at the trade show mentioned how noticeable the bathroom advert was.
“Hey, I saw your advert in the bathroom” quickly became a very common introduction line as visitors stopped by our booth to learn more about The Code’s work.
However, the most unexpected result from The Code’s unorthodox advertising style came on the last day of the ITB show when Richard Quest from CNN appeared at our booth first thing on the Friday morning and asked our chairman Matthias Leisinger to appear in a live interview later that day to discuss the issue of Child Sex Tourism.
Matthias quickly accepted and the interview was a huge success, leading to several new companies signing up to join The Code and a XX% increase in Facebook and XX% increase in Twitter followers of The Code.
And the reason The Code ended up on CNN? Well, at the end of the interview Richard Quest says that he read about us in the bathroom and just had to learn more.
We’ll have our work cut out next year to beat that.