The writing is on the… sand!

I have heard about and seen, skywriting. More famously, Zoho used skywriting in a brilliant guerrilla marketing tactic to troll rival Salesforce at the latter’s Dreamforce 2016 event. It was so visible and popular that many attendees saw it and tweeted it, right from Dreamforce’s venue!

But sand-writing is new! At best, I have seen sand-writing in Indian movies where the lead pair wistfully writes something, only to have the waves wash it over, in a scene to indicate something ominous and depressing.

Given this backdrop, Volkswagen Amarok’s sand-writing is one of those, ‘How did no one think of this earlier?’ ideas. Take a look (by the agency Geometry, Buenos Aires)!

It’s alarmingly simple. Create a stencil for the tyre and simply drive all over the beach, literally using beach as your media channel! It’d obviously get messy as people start walking on it, eventually, but the beauty of this idea is that you can drive as many times as you want, leaving your trail every single time! It’s like the erasable slate we had as kids – you write on it, peel off the top sheet and it all goes off. Write again, and repeat.

A more recent idea using the same sand-writing technique was attempted by Wunderman, Dubai, for client Charicycles.

But this idea was considerably more labored and stretched beyond limits since they were trying to tell a longer story using thin cycle tyres. Sand-writing, like sky-writing and outdoor billboards, works on brevity – there is just one message you can communicate repeatedly. Try telling something longer, the audience doesn’t get anything!

I wonder if any other brand has used sand (usually available in this quantity and (wet) consistency only in beaches) to this effect, as an advertising medium! Sounds fantastic as a medium in Indian cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Goa among others!

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