Agency: Copeland – Zombies, Interns and Advertising in Victoria
Posted by Fred Yang on April 8th, 2011
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If there’s one thing the team at Copeland loves, it’s social media. Using it right and actively can do ad students wonders! I was able to stumble upon them through Twitter, checked out their website and saw a very interested theme going on: Zombies. After contacting them and asking them to write a quick introduction about themselves, I present to you, Copeland Agency from Victoria, BC (Canada).
As a 12-person ad agency in a small town on an Island, we know that appointing a new account manager or orchestrating a successful campaign is not going to put us on the map – especially with the national media, obsessed as they are with multinational agencies and million dollar accounts.
So we did something fun to get noticed.
We held a contest to find summer interns among Vancouver Island colleges and universities.
To qualify, students had to submit their applications using Zombies as a theme. Zombies have been part of Copeland’s office culture for years, so the tactic felt authentic.
We promoted it through our blog and social media channels and made this video:
We sure got lots of interest, some incredible entries and ultimately a winner in a public vote.
Our four finalists were so damn good, we ended up taking on all four as interns. Although they will, appropriately, be staggered.
But that’s not the end of the story. We also got featured on the front page of the Business Section in the Times Colonist, on the homepage of US-based Advertising Age (the world’s largest advertising publication), on blogs across North America, in Mexican, Caribbean and South American newspapers and marketing mags, and in this television story by Channel 11 here on the Island.
As nice as getting some publicity for Copeland was, we were also thrilled to bring these amazing students to the attention of the communities outside their schools.
That hits at our values as a group. We are social media crazy, and true to the spirit of those platforms, we believe in being generous and offering value without weighing it constantly against the expected return.
Everyone at Copeland is involved in our social media efforts. We believe what social media superstar Jay Baer told us when he did workshops with us in November: “If you don’t like social media, you suck at it.” We like it.
Of course that’s a small part of what we do as a business. We build brands, we dig deep into target audiences, and we create ongoing engagement strategies between the two, social media being just one of them.
For us, holding a Zombie Intern Contest for students was absolutely in line with this methodology. We knew the students would enjoy making videos and posting them to YouTube way more than banging out a resume and cover letter.
We ended up getting the results we wanted in the language of our culture.
Which, when you think of it, is what ad agencies are supposed to do.
- Copeland
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