MTN Free Ad

Here's another one not for the awards. The brief started cramped: we had money, but very little time to produce an ad for Women's Day. For every handset sold, a percentage went to an NGO called POWA (People Opposing Woman Abuse). Someone found a music video on youtube, we showed it to client and asked them if we did something like that for them for free, would they donate the production budget to the NGO? They said they would. Then we got the media owners to donate the media space, and MTN gave what they would have spent on media to the NGO as well. A guy in the studio played guitar into the laptop, and the rest is Powerpoint history. The advertising community was absolutely livid about the "stolen idea", but we never pretended it was our idea. It was just the best way to give the most money possible to the NGO instead of dumping it into the fat coffers of a production house.