A pun-tastic product provides fertile territory for egg-based stunt

Sometimes, there’s a pretty solid argument that says, if you find a great pun and work back from there to the PR idea that might deliver it, you’ve probably got the makings of a great campaign.

There were two such puns involved here.

First you have “March Fourth” as the name for an event that features people walking to support wounded soldiers that takes place on … yep, 4 March 2012. Lovely.

Then you have “Eggs for Soldiers,” the product that made page three of the METRO amongst a pretty clean sweep of the tabloid media last week.

This was the little gem that they rolled into the Imperial War Museum for the photo-stunt …

Now if I’m honest, I actually think that this is one of those “let’s make a ‘making of’ film” ideas that has gone slightly awry.

Based on the by the YouTube comments, folk are a bit disappointed that they’ve shown that the egg box tank is actually a bloody great wooden frame merely covered in egg boxes – it’s a reminder that sometimes it’s better not to show your audience how the magic trick worked.

That aside, Eggs for Soldiers (pun number two) has pulled a blinder with this one. The product is a cracker for sure – great name, bang-on cause from a media point-of-view.

But the trick that I doff my cap to is the construction of their story.

The product alone would get them only so far through PR. So the insight was to create an event (in March Fourth) that would get people talking and to PR that instead.

However, the coup de grace was that they then managed – in promoting their sponsorship – to work the product back in via the stunt.

The tank’s a stunt for a charity walk (a less commercial sell when it comes to hitting the news desks and explaining why you’re making tanks out of egg boxes), but the picture works the product back in front-and-centre.

I imagine that if they’d phoned the desks to say they’d built a tank to do nothing more than promote some eggs, they’d have got less coverage altogether.

In building a stronger narrative around what remains a great core story and picture, the team behind this campaign has achieved infinitely better results than otherwise they might have done.

A smart idea for sure. But even smarter is the way it’s been sold.