On The Campaign Trail

A little over a week ago I told y’all about Saatchi & Saatchi seemingly putting an internship up for auction on eBay.

It was actually me, applying for the Saatchi summer scheme. The brief was to turn a piece of paper into a job. I thought about what to do for days, what could I do? I considered writing an acceptance letter from Saatchis to me offering me the job, maybe dating it back in the 70s and claiming I had a job offer from them for years, doing a photo collage type thing of my life and on and on. The brief was simple, but I didn’t want to do anything that everyone would think of. Turn the poster into a job? I did. A virtual job to be exact. I set up the auction id – saatchigradrecruitment, created the auction (complete with lame description) and seeded it on the BrandRepublic forums, Facebook, Digg, ihaveandidea and some other places I can’t remember. The idea for the auction itself only came about 3 days before the application was due back at Charlotte Street (with much help from Jack ‘Alex’ Bauer from the BR forums – so major props to my boy Jack), so I wasn’t entirely optimistic about drumming up enough buzz to get some media coverage. But the power of this internet thing was soon revealed to yours truly, when bloggers started picking it up thinking that Saatchis had put it up themselves. I was majorly happy. And itching to tell them ‘It wasn’t them, It was me!!!’. But I had to wait it out and see if I could get some big publicity and sure enough the really good stuff was still to come.

James Hamilton from Campaign had a look at the auction and gave Saatchis a call, who told him they had no idea who it was and that it was most definitely not them. James posted as much on the BR forums so I gave him a call and told him it was me, a punk AdLad trying to stir up a place at Saatchis for the summer. This is what he wrote. I haven’t heard from Saatchis yet so let’s see if what I did was enough to get me in.

Before I finish, you all should know that Campaign, Saatchis and one of the AdLads have some history, namely Anton starting a hurricane of publicity a few years ago when he applied for the summer scheme by putting the ‘Nothing Is Impossible’ logo on M&Cs website (or was it?). M&C threatened to sue him and Campaign, upon hearing about this said ‘Surely it would be better for M&C to hire the graduate before Saatchis does’. Exactly.