How we managed to feed 18000 people pasta bolognese for a social media activation

Throughout all my years in the business, I have had an issue with the case studies we share. To put it mildly, they suck. They offer no factual information on how the project was and overstate their role and the project's performance. So starting today, I'll try to give a sneak peek at how the sausage is made. Maybe it will be helpful for people in the industry to understand the actual process behind campaigns that performed beyond our wildest expectations.?

So let's set the stage.?

The year is 2016, yes, before covid; it's early July, and we are a young agency straggling to make our mark in the industry. We came out of a partnership through a painful divorce because we wanted to do things differently. After a long year of trying to find our footing, we finally have some traction. Things are moving in the right direction. We have a huge project underway with one of the big FMCG players in the market that also expressed the intention to buy us out. They didn't, but this is for another story.??

"I spoke to Marialena, who I knew from her previous role. She is now Head of Marketing at Melissa, the biggest pasta brand in Greece. She wants to see the company and might consider us for their social media spec. My business partner George comes in with a pitch.

We accept the meeting and drive over and meet them. The discussion went excellent, and we got a new session so they could brief us on the spec.?

It's now late July, and we just got briefed on a social media project for Melissa. They want us to pitch in 4 weeks, but we are thinly stressed for resources, and to add up to the problems, we, as all greek agencies do, are going to close for two weeks in August. Myrto, our client service director at the time and general manager now, comes into my office worried. "We cannot do it. There isn't anybody available to work on the spec. We have to decline and focus on the other project." I calm her down and tell her not to worry. I'm not going on vacation; I will be here and run all the basics of the spec so that we'll have to produce the spec creative work when we come back. The next day I got a call from the people of the FMCG with the "suggestion" not to work on the other pitch and not to switch focus. I reassured them we won't but would work on the pitch.?

The brief (the basics that I can share)

The brief was pretty straightforward. We are the market leaders in the space. We are an urban brand that needs to reach a younger audience through social media. The single-minded strategic proposition of the brand was unchanged for over thirty years, and rightly so. "We are paste lovers."?

The Idea?

It's now the second week of August. The city is empty, and I'm trying to solve the riddle for the pitch. Yes, OK, a lot of things were pretty straightforward. Yummy social media posts, recipes, and so on. But this is what all the other agencies would pitch. We were saying that we try to do the unexpected, and this wasn't the unexpected. I researched the brand, the competition, and the old advertising; I asked friends and peers, I basically had done my homework, but I was still far from having a breakthrough that would put us ahead. I decided to go and do some errings in the center of Athens.?

It's noon, and I'm driving back home through the empty streets. I'm listening to a sports radio, and suddenly, as the two presenters are closing their broadcast, they start chatting. "Wouldn't it be great to have a plate of pasta with ground beef?" said the first. The other replied, "Yes, yes, in a big bowl with cheese on top MMMMM"?

And it clicked. I turn the corner and stop the car. I take out my notepad and start taking notes. The basics are:

• How can I take them pasta to eat?
• Maybe a canteen
• How do I find them? ( I quickly search Twitter for mentions of "makaronia me kima." I find lots)
• Twitter replies and immediate replies and arrangements. Maybe it can work.?
• And finally. Where do we park this thing?

And so we got "The Idea," which went beyond what anybody else could pitch.?

I called a friend who had experience with food, food trucks, etc. I asked him all the specifics about how something like this could work. I got the basics down.?

I verified my initial data from Twitter and started validating the idea. Makaronia me Kima, our version of Pasta Bolognese, is the ultimate comfort food for most Greeks. Nothing reminds us more of mom food, like a big plate with kefalotyri cheese sprinkled on top. A tweet read, "I want to spend some time alone with a plate of makaronia me Kima."??

Yes, the idea was solid. And the project could be done in theory.?

In short:

We monitor Twitter.?

Whenever someone mentions that they are hungry, or they like pasta, etc., we contact them and offer to go there and serve them "Makaronia me Kima."?

As soon as we know where they are, the van starts, and we go and feed them.?

We come back from summer vacations, and we work on the pitch. We create illustrations and demos of our ideas. We present it to the Melissa team. When they see the "Melissa on the road" idea, it's clear we hit the spot. They stopped caring about anything else. In the rare occasions this happens, you just know. A couple of weeks later, we get the call with the good news. We won the business, and they are willing to stretch their budget to make the idea happen.?

The implementation

And so the tricky part begins. How can an ad agency build a canteen and offer great food to individuals within the legal framework of Greece? I already knew, thanks to my friend, the basic legal framework. To operate a commercial canteen, you need to use one of the already existing ones with a license. You could purchase one for around ten thousand euros, and then you needed a special permit on where to operate from. But we weren't a commercial canteen. We were a promotional stunt. So we just needed a place to legally park, and we could offer food for free.?

We have a meeting with the Melissa team and start to try to form the idea into something tangible. We are exploring ideas about an airstream, a VW van, or a modern VAN specially customized for us. The Airstream idea wasn't feasible. Too costly and very hard to move around and park. The modern VAN was OK, but it lacked flair, so we decided to find out if we could find and modify a VW van. Turns out there are two guys in Athens that specialize in modifying VW vans.?

Enter Markos. He obviously doesn't like us at first. Yiannis, my other business partner, and I don't enjoy him either. Things changed, but at first, the energy wasn't great. He buys and modifies vans. He's done some projects, but nothing like the one we wanted to do. It took for the project to start for him to understand the specifics. He kept saying we were crazy and didn't know how to run activations. He got the crazy part right in his defense.?

The project is full of variables.?

How would the van look?

Who will drive it?

Who will maintain it?

Who will cook??

How can we be safe as far as the food is concerned?

How can we get electricity to cook?

Just to name a few.?

We start to implement the project.?

The general idea was to rent a modified to our needs van and use it for forty days. Markos would get paid for the modifications and rent us the van and the driver per diem.?

We start designing the VAN, but at the same time, we have other things to think of. How and where were the preparations for the food to be cooked. Who would cook? How were we going to run operations and procurement???

All these questions are way beyond the scope of an ad agency. We were crazy and weren't willing not to tackle them all. I already told you Markos had one thing right.?

The problems are more than the solutions. And to top it all off? Our first choice for the chef wasn't working. But we weren't willing to handle this part of the project since he was instrumental in answering all our problems. So he deserved the chance.?

We've reached May 2017. I was at a potential client meeting when I got a worried call from Marialena. She was rightfully concerned. The project, through a lot of challenges and strokes of pure luck, like the pick Vanessa did for the color of the VAN, was almost done. But the few things that remained to be taken care of weren't a breeze. The biggest??

How can we have electricity to cook. Gas was out of the question, so we needed to cook on portable electric stoves.?

Markos was waiting for this one. He had a "solution" to carry around another VAN with a huge generator to procure electricity. The cost of the project would triple with his solution. He was adamant that this was the only way. Little did he know that I had a degree in chemical engineering and could easily handle fundamental electricity challenges. We started exchanging heated e-mails where I asked questions about the electricity needs, and he was replying angrily. I got my answers and got to work. I calculated the electricity needed from the electric stoves. I added up the electricity necessary for everything else and found out we could purchase a petrol generator on wheels that would wait almost 100kgr and could be loaded on the VAN through a ramp. We would have all the electricity we needed for less than fifteen hundred euros plus the petrol required.?

We exchanged a couple of not-so-polite e-mails with Markos, and next Tuesday, Yiannis and I will take the generator and test it with Markos and his "electrician'. The little prick thought he had one on us. He even laughed and took a video of us trying to take the generator out of Yiannis's. But his face when we connected everything, and it worked, was priceless. Too bad we didn't get the photo :)

We had everything working, and we were almost ready. Almost being the keyword here. We had to create a HASP report (and follow it). Thankfully my wife wrote the report for us, and my chemical engineering degree allowed me to be the one to follow through on it legally so we could safely offer food to people. We took all the necessary measures. Procured fresh meat, handled everything in a dedicated freezer with temperature control, etc.?

One thing remained. Who would be the project manager of day-to-day operations? We had some ideas, but my friend Nikolas gave me the solution. He told me Christos was just out of his army duty and was seeking new employment. Christos was a jack of all trades. He could run operations, handle procurement, take photos and videos, and talk to people. He was the perfect candidate for the job.?

And just when we thought everything was done, I got a meeting request from our chef. Marialena had huge concerns about him, but I guaranteed him. He told me he had found other employment and couldn't do the project. Less than a week from the kick-off, after being through hell to have everything ready and me personally vouching for him against almost everybody, he bails on us. To top things off, I had to be out of the country for the next few days.?

Where would we find a chef? How? And especially in the summer when almost everybody is employed in the tourism sector. Chloe came to the rescue. Our copywriter at the time had a cousin who worked as a chef and knew many people in the business, so he set up three candidates. So we met Lucas. Lucas was what the project needed. An easy-going, hard-working, cool guy willing to work on it and love it. It was the last Friday of June 2017. The guys met him, and next Tuesday, we had the first test event lined up at the Melissa premises for them to show off the van to the employees.?

The heat was off the charts. 40+ degrees celsius (104 F) but everything went smoothly. We planned another event, and then we would try to see if our idea worked. The event also went great; it was time for the "Melissa on the Road" project to be tested. Tuesday, July 11, was our day. Everything is set. The VAN is ready, and we are monitoring Twitter for mentions on food and hunger. We are obviously very anxious and hope that somebody will show up.?

The tweet comes in. Katerina, a marketing manager at a big natural cosmetics company, writes, "We are looking for ideas on what to eat in the Metamorfosi area, and nothing seems to be legit." We reply as the VAN. But nobody knows about us, so it's a little bit awkward. Turns out Vanessa knows her, so she texts her and tells her we are for real. She plays ball. She replies, and we go over. We feed more than 80 people. They go wild. They love it. We know we have a winner.?

A week passed, and on July 20, I was at my friend Elias's house for a small gathering for his name day. I'm sitting next to a couple of people I don't know, and I catch the conversation. They are talking about the Melissa van that went to the company next to them last week in Metamorfosi and fed them "Makaronia me Kima" and how awesome it was. I didn't say anything. I was celebrating quietly.?

The project went great. The initial forty days ended up being a year and a half. During this time, we managed to serve more than 18000 portions of pasta, mainly "Makaronia me Kima" we went to NGOs and institutions that did good, and we offered all the remaining portions of each day to an NGO named "Mporoume" that fed those in need. Yiannis gained almost 6 kilograms from the project since he ate his favorite food nearly daily. We got more than eleven million free impressions from user-generated content since we didn't spend anything on media and had colossal PR success.?

We won many awards and solidified our reputation for being out-of-the-box thinkers who could do things nobody else could.??

Markos was the happiest since he got more than thirty brands to ask for a modified VW van so they could ride the wave. Nobody managed to replicate the success since they couldn't get the direct connection we got from our Twitter conversation. As time progressed, people started to mention us directly and ask us to go and feed them.

This project was the most intensive we ever took over. It wasn't the biggest as far as budget is concerned or the most important for its impact. It was the hardest, though. The trust that Marialena and her team afforded us was crucial for the project, and we will be eternally grateful for the chance.?

Sad part. After a couple of years, we decided to drop the client since our vision of what we could do for them going forward and their willingness to assign us collided. The VAN still runs around and does events now that the Covid restrictions have been lifted. Not by directly communicating since, to run that kind of operation, you need to be a little bit crazy :)

Oh, I forgot the best part. This was the cherry on top. Markos bought the generator from us to use in his other projects.?