Watershed organised ‘Britain’s Smelliest Cheese Championships’ which was to be held at The Royal Bath & West Show Ground in order to publicise the show. The agency cleverly drip-fed the media information, cheesy facts, and even sent some smelly cheese to local and national radio stations to get them on the air. They had to concentrate on short lead and online media because long-lead print titles were not available to them with the short amount of time they had.
In terms of measurable success, they exceeded their targets. Watershed was brought on board with The Royal Bath & West Show only three months before the agricultural event took place. They were allocated a budget of £5,000 and the main objective of getting visitors through the gates in spite of the recession. Not only did they manage to attract the second highest number of visitors to the show since 2004, they also managed to secure over 160 pieces of coverage in both national and regional media.
It’s hard to believe that such a successful campaign could be both created and executed within three months. Perhaps the fact that they had such a limited time scale meant that the campaign was more cohesive and driven.
In your experience, is it more or less effective to have shorter timescales for large-scale tasks? Do you think the short amount of time Watershed PR had to create and execute the PR campaign might have affected the success of the outcome? In what way? Could they have been even more successful given more time?
