X-Factor

So for the last two weeks we've been having an X-factoresque week with advertising agencies in London, doing campaigns and seeing who did the best ones. Thursday night was the finale with Saatchi and Saatchi, who set us quite a different brief from any other agency.

The brief was to go around London and get 20 people to do something for us. We weren't allowed to say that we were students or that we were doing it for Saatchi and Saatchi so we had to come up with a good enough strategy so people would actually do something for us.

First of all Sarah and I went to a cafe to sit down and think for a bit. We came to the decision that we were going to try and get people to stand in shop windows and pretend to be mannequins. We weren't sure how to go about doing this so first off we went around to the shops and asked if it would be OK to get random people to stand in their windows. Surprisingly they all said no, apparently its illegal. So, how were we going to go about this? We decided we were just going to do it without asking and our strategy to get people to do this was to ask people if they were spontaneous. Many people straight away said yes. So we asked them to prove it. We told them we didn't think people were as spontaneous as they thought they were, people were like robots now days and never had fun anymore. People immediately took us up on the challenge.

We were off, it all started quite smoothly, we got 3 people to pose in H&M's shop window but then the security guard noticed what we were doing when the forth person went in to pose. Our poor forth person, I'm not going to lie, I felt a bit bad. We weren't the ones who got in trouble, he went in and when the bouncer told him to get out the poor guy started fighting our cause, he told the bouncer he was just having a little fun. Things got heated quite rapidly and we had to go in and break them up before anything bad happened. He was shouting at the security guard that he was just being spontaneous and that the security guard should have fun too but that he had a shit job and probably didn't know how to have fun. When we finally got him out of the store we apologised but he said it was OK and that he was just angry at the security guard, he just didn't know how to have fun.

Well, after that incident we decided to move on. It took us a moment to recover from but we managed to get more people to do it, and we think they all had a little bit of fun. In total we managed to get 22 people to do it, which we thought was quite good, we ran into a little bit of trouble in other shops, when I say we I actually mean the people we got to pose who were fighting our cause, we were just standing outside taking pictures. Many people wanted us to send them pictures via email so we will. All in all, it was a fun day, and I think the guys at Saatchi's actually liked it.