DHL’s hilarious advert troll, uses sneaky ninja packaging to trick rivals TNT and UPS into parading large yellow boxes with “DHL is Faster” around city centres. Genius.
You’ll never see a shipping company carrying a box branded by a rival, they would rather repackage the parcel at the nearest depot than walk around advertising their rival’s brand, no company in their right mind would allow that!
But that’s exactly what DHL managed to trick competitors, UPS and TNT into doing.
So how did they do it?
They printed the outer packaging with a thermochromatic foil, and disguised the boxes to ensure they went out in the delivery vehicles unsuspected. Clever stuff.
Thermochromatic Printing
They used this heat-reactive packaging to camouflage the yellow boxes. When the temperature dropped low enough, the boxes turned black, with everyone none the wiser to the ruse and happily packing them into trucks ready for delivery. This is the same sort of technology that is used for mood rings etc.
The Plan
These boxes eventually warmed up, on the purposefully long routes far from any car parks, forcing the poor unsuspecting delivery guys to parade DHL’s claim of faster delivery through busy city centres, in front of hundreds of people.
The Results
All danced to DHL’s trolling tune with the exception of one enterprising UPS chap, who taped over the offending message, and still lived up to his end of the bargain by delivering the package.
Kudos to DHL
This was all set up and timed perfectly to allow DHL’s video crew to capture the trolling action and post it up on youtube for us all to enjoy. Expert trolling, we don’t know if DHL are faster, but their marketing is certainly some of the best!
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