Mattress and bed campaigns have become hugely popular in the last few years. Not engaging, compelling or distinctive. Just popular. Howatson+Company and mattress start-up, 10:PM have launched a mattress campaign. It’s engaging, compelling and distinctive. Hugely distinctive.
The campaign has turned abandoned mattresses into guerrilla billboards. (Over 1.8 million bacteria-laden, skin-cell-infested mattresses are illegally dumped in Australia every year – and they’re all free media.) It is made up of ads stencilled on abandoned beds and wonderful little films that tell the stories of those rancid mattresses based on where they were dumped – comparing them with 10:PM’s microbe-neutralising mattresses.
The films were directed by Scoundrel’s James Dive.
Parliament House Spineless:
Bondi Backpackers:
Darlinghurst Queen:
Watsons Bay Swingers:
The team scoured Sydney’s inner-city suburbs to find discarded mattresses and wrote long copy unique to each. These messages were converted into mattress-sized stamps, one judgemental letter at a time, before the team installed the ‘bed-verts’ in the same locations they were found.
The mattress billboards have taken curious onlookers by surprise. Exposing a global gathering of dead skin particles in Bondi backpacker-land, an underground swinger scene in affluent Watson’s Bay, a queen who partied too hard in Pride capital, Darlinghurst, and more.
Harrison Reid, founder of 10:PM, stated, “We’re stoked to be working with Howatson+Company to launch 10:PM. As a start-up we don’t have the media budget to reach millions of people like our competitors, so we used dumped mattresses to our advantage to create buzz and engagement, as well as reach people.”
Doug Hamilton, creative director at Howatson+Company, added, “This campaign takes advantage of an amazing free media that thousands of us walk past every day. With some loving craft and cheeky copy, our competitor’s old, soiled, dumped mattresses became the perfect vehicle to help 10:PM disrupt the category, and make anyone who sleeps, reconsider the state of their current mattress.”
The campaign is running across out of home, social channels and PR.
Credits
Client: 10:PM
Agency: Howatson+Company
Founder & CEO: Chris Howatson
Managing Director: Renee Hyde
Executive Creative Director: Gavin Chimes
Creative Directors: Michael Kleinman & Doug Hamilton
Art Director: Raff Gandrabur
Copywriter: Zoe Finkelstein
Design Director: Ellena Mills
Chief Strategy Officer: Dom Hickey
Group Business Director: Katy Ward
Business Director: Sasha Thariani
Head of Production: Holly Alexander
Senior Editor: King Yong Senior
Account Director (PR): Melinda Durston
PR Executive: Millie Clout
Production Company: Scoundrel
Director: James Dive
Executive Producer: Adrian Shapiro
Producer: Charlie Taylor
DOP: Jordan Maddocks
Music & Sound: Heckler Sound
Composer: Johnny Green Sound
Designer: Dave Robertson
Executive Producer: Bonnie Law
