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Client: Xerox
Creative Agency: VML
Media Agency: Young & Rubicam
Technology Vendor: MediaEdge:CIA

Xerox recently launched a new integrated advertising campaign in North America that pokes fun at office life, while conveying the message that Xerox provides affordable color for the office.
 
The playful style of the campaign includes TV, print and interactive, and is targeted toward businesses of all sizes. The Affordable Color campaign emphasizes that any business can afford Xerox color, and this campaign delivers that message with both credibility and fun.
 
The campaign includes two television commercials that offer tongue-in-cheek takes on the trials and tribulations of office life.  The main characters in these commercials are a manager, a staff person, and an IT professional. Their situations convey affordable color solutions from Xerox, but only after one of the characters does something funny, or causes one of those awkward office moments.
 
Can the Acronymanator and Goats Improve an Office?
Maybe not, but it is arguably the most entertaining part of the Frugal Color campaign. "The site," Bonnie Jaeckel, senior advertising manager at Xerox pointed out, "is playful and engaging. It pushes the boundaries, yet delivers key affordable Xerox color messages."
 
Your first clue? The narrator's mock-serious tone urges you to "put the fun back into fundamental fiscal responsibility." And, you are provided bogus money-saving tips urging you to explore new depths of office frugality. Ideas include an acronymanator, because acronyms save valuable time, and a downloadable office goat that eliminates waste, takes the blame, and does it for celery not salary.
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(click to view)The triumvirate from the television commercials is also featured online with flash videos showing their struggles with daily office dilemmas.  
 
For all the campaign's light-heartedness, Xerox is very serious about capturing more of the $20-plus billion office color market.

View the print, online, and television elements of the Affordable Color campaign and see how you can put the "fun" back into fundamental fiscal responsibility with FrugalColor.
-- Barbara Basney, director global advertising, Xerox Corporation

A funny thing happened to Xerox. Its name became synonymous with photocopies as its brand became largely irrelevant to those making copies. Frugal Color, Y&R’s site for Xerox, is part of a campaign to make the Xerox brand relevant again by recasting it as an edgy outsider poking fun at corporate culture. Thanks to some high production values and good writing the recasting effort works.

In Choose Wisely you are presented with four video dilemmas and it’s your job to pick the office worker who will have the best solution: the suckup manager, the lazy staff member or the clever IT worker. The predictability of the IT worker always being right might have worn thin had the video not been genuinely funny.

The Explore Frugality section contains some well thought out digital tchotchkes. I particularly liked the Mad Libs style fill in the blanks Conference Report and the Coffee Run PDFs. They were downloads that I could actually see people downloading and using, and they were clearly branded Xerox. I also enjoyed the Acronymanator, which takes any ten letter word (yes ANY, try it) and turns it into a vacuous business acronym (e.g., Streamlined Proprietary Aggressive Matrix.)


(click to view)With the dollars being spent on online media, the level of effort put into this creative (and the related viral video at Extreme Offices), campaigns like this should be the norm for big brands, not the exception.
-- Patrick V. Barrett, senior user interaction designer, Bazaarvoice

The Xerox "Frugal Color" campaign is an especially humorous and engaging interactive campaign that transforms one of the most abhorred office product procurement processes into a fun and surprisingly informative activity! 

Navigating the Xerox "Frugal Color" campaign website, site visitors are invited to activate a number of vignettes, play games and review actual printing products, all aimed at helping to answer the inevitable pricing, cost-savings and feature by feature questions one faces when procuring office commodities.

Fortunately, the campaign does not abandon humor when it gets to providing visitors with the actual information that they need to consolidate their printing via one multi-color printer. At this stage, it continues to offer clever audio clips and other bonuses that close the campaign loop.

(click to view)My only critiques of the campaign were that it could have achieved greater impact in shorter form, and the speed of audio was quite slow. I might not forward the campaign as it requires quite a bit of time to get through. But ultimately, I felt closer and more positive about the Xerox brand, more informed and actually have enough information to potentially buy or recommend the Xerox offerings. Kudos.
-- Lana McGilvray, VP of marketing, Datran Media