When working as the brand manager on Julia Donaldson’s books at Macmillan Publishing I was lucky enough to work on the marketing campaign of dreams. It led to a Guinness World Record being broken. Want to hear about it? Read on . . .
First up, I want to say that I’m not writing this post to bang my own marketing trumpet but more to illustrate that thinking outside of normal marketing channels can really boost a book campaign, as well as book and author’s visibility. This campaign is a brilliant illustration of what can happen when you come up with a seemingly outlandish idea and follow it through.
The Book
Julia Donaldson is the biggest selling children’s author in the UK, best known for her books with Axel Scheffler; The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom amongst others. If you have kids, you almost certainly have one of her books on your bookshelves.
Julia works with several illustrators and this book was a new partnership with Rebecca Cobb, who was a rising stat at the time. The book was called The Paper Dolls
The book is a heartbreakingly beautiful book about a little girl and her mum making chains of paper dolls. It is also about the power of memory and family.
The Challenge
The challenge was that Julia’s books with Axel are instantly recognizable but this book, with a new pairing illustrator for Julia, would not be instantly recognizable beyond Julia’s name.
So how to market it? How to spread the word about this new Julia Donaldson book? We had Julia’s existing fan channels and every bookshop in the land was already committed to taking the book, but we needed to get the message about the book to consumers so that they would seek it out
The Idea
In a brainstorm with the brilliant publicist Lauren Ace we came up with the idea of making chains of paper dolls to promote the book and then extrapolated the idea to attempt to break the world record for the longest ever chain of paper dolls. We were lucky to have the support of Macmillan, Julia and Rebecca for this seemingly madcap scheme.
How We Shaped the Campaign
To break the record we needed over 2.6km’s (1.6 miles) of Paper Dolls.
Rebecca drew a template to get kids all over the world to color in and return. We would then them create a giant chain.
We made the Paper Doll templates into activity sheets – you could either draw your own dolls or color in the template. We got the template out to kids all over the world through bookshops, international publishers, schools, kids organizations such as The Rainbows and The Scouts and Brownies, press and advertising as well as our online and social channels. Every set of the dolls was returned to my desk at Macmillan either by post or email. We needed at least 7500 sheets to be returned to us to have a chance of breaking the record.
We made a video to show how to complete them and enter.
We built a landing page for the campaign which housed all the assets and you could submit entires via a form. We created trailers and info about the book. The book was published as the marketing campaign to break the record kicked in.
Partnerships
We partnered with Save the Children to extend the reach of the campaign and get the book’s family-focused message out further. They also shared the World Record Assets. We pledged 10p for every set of dolls.
Logistics
Once the campaign launched we had a moment where we wondered if we’d ever get enough applications in. We need not have worried! We received more dolls than actually made it into the chain.
We asked that every doll submitted had an email address on the back. We collated a mailing list and kept people updated with the record attempt and meant we were building a dedicated mailing list for our authors and thier future books.
When the dolls started being delivered in large quantities we realized we had a problem. All the dolls needed cutting out and their hands connecting. They all needed counting precisely too. The team all took vast quantities home but we also had to hire a company to help, piece work. Interns at Macmillan helped us decipher and input the emails.
Location was a massive challenge for this record attempt. We needed somewhere indoors (London is windy and rainy – not good for dolls made of paper!). We needed somewhere big enough to lay out what turned out to be nearly 5km of paper dolls. We talked to various spaces in London until The Southbank Centre very kindly offered us their Clore Ballroom space for one day in order to support us and Save the Children.
The Record Attempt
Having collected, cut out, joined, and colored in nearly 5kms of dolls we needed to join them all up (they were in envelopes of 100 dolls each) and lay them all out for measuring. The day was November 11 2013. We started laying dolls at 5am. Video showing us all doing the logistics on the day here.
We laied dolls in a snake around the massive space until the adjudicator from Guinness arrived and the measuring began.
Time-lapse of us laying them all out.
We had done it! Here is the moment we broke the world record with a chain of paper dolls 4.6km long and made up of 45k + dolls and donated 4,528 pounds to Save The Children.
After the Record. The Results.
The work of the campaign didn’t stop there. We garnered great press coverage for the record
The Guardian The BBC , Emirates.
- The sales figures for the books were fantastic and surpassed sales of books that Julia had done with other new illustrators by 70% in the first 6 months.
- We published a World Record version of the book with pictures of the record attempt and all the dolls featured on the end papers.
- We gathered a huge email mailing list for both Julia, Rebecca and Macmillan Children’s Books for future book promotion.
- We had a shiny world record certificate!
