There is a middle-aged woman on Facebook – the page is called I-Ju – who’s intriguingly pictured wearing Steve Jobs’ trademark black turtleneck pullover. She must be pretty clever, right, a savvy self-promoter? She was intriguing enough that some people actually tried to order items from Je-Ju Construction Materials, as advertised, but they didn’t get anywhere. Nobody answered the phone.
Every day “Je-Ju” posted the same smiling self-portrait attached to a different amusing quote, along the lines of “Money problems? Wear a university student uniform to buy bricks” and “Love is torn, seal it with Millcon Steel.”
Visitors to the page left comments and “Je-Ju” replied, but no one was ever able to place an order for bricks or steel or anything else. “Does she even have a store?” they wondered.
Then a video commercial appeared, revealing that Je-Ju wasn’t an actual person, and within 48 hours 500,000 people had watched it. In less than a week the page earned 80,000 “likes”. What was going on?
A columnist at MarketingOops.com who goes by the attractive name pigabyte praised the effort for successfully advertising a commodity, namely construction material, that’s never easy to market. “This is a very interesting case study for all marketers. We have to give them a big hand.”
Take a bow, Pippo Pramewith Sreechatthiwong, founder of the storytelling community Storylog, who came up with the commercial – but he says it was all just a fluke.
“I’d love to go with the flow and claim we worked very hard on it and planned every step, but the fact is there was no plan at all. We simply came up with an idea and, boom, before we realised what was going on, our work was a hit.”
Pippo explains that he scripted a commercial three years ago for Builk, free software for running construction businesses, in which he appeared as the character Hea Ou. Then this year Patai “Boat” Padungtin, an evangelist and one of the bosses at Builk, asked him to come up with sequels for two clients. Pippo, reviving his Hea Ou alter ego, decided to have the Millcon Steel character do battle with a light-sabre and for Steve Jobs fan Je-Ju to handle the pitch for Yello. “I was surprised to get the green light,” he says. “Even I thought the scripts were crazy!”
Working on a limited budget, Pippo made the two commercials with Don’t Panic Studio and Klackfilms. A Facebook page was launched, a photo of the characters uploaded and tie-in taglines introduced, all in preparation for the video pitch. Everyone on the production team was stunned to see the mock-up photo amass 5,000 “likes” in under six hours.
“We were amazed at both the speed and the number of people sharing what we planned for our commercial,” Pippo says. “We decided to alter the script accordingly to avoid unnecessary drama by making it clear right away that Je-Ju wasn’t a real person.
“The Je-Ju phenomenon just took on a momentum all its own, and the best thing is we didn’t have to spend a single baht!”
This source first appeared on The Nation Life.