Aaron's shop was wrecked by the rioters
Photo by Dan Kitwood, courtesy of Getty Images
Following last summer's D&AD New Blood Creative Advertising graduate team Björn Conradi and Sophie Browness managed to land a placement at world famous ad agency BBH as part of the BBH Barn programme. Here's Sophie reporting back:-
"As part of our placement at BBH we were given the brief 'Do something good, famously.' After a long think about what good we could do, the London riots started and we knew this was our opportunity. Working with fellow 'BBH Barner' Omid Fard we set up a blog to help 89 year old barber Aaron Biber rebuild his shop that was destroyed by looters. After a long night of tweeting and getting the word out there, it spread."
The Keep Aaron Cutting blog site
"In a couple of days the campaign reached over 2.5 million twitter impressions, and raised £35,000 to get Aaron back in business. 'Keep Aaron Cutting' was featured in just about every national newspaper, the shop was swarming with TV news crews and even got a spot in Campaign. "
"Boris Johnson popped by to be told his parting will make him go bald and footballer Peter Crouch (an ex BBH intern) visited for a trim. We wanted to show that amongst all the bad press that social media was receiving, that it can be used for good. And luckily enough we did it rather famously too."
London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, visits Aaron in his shop
And VERY famous it became too. The project was featured in The Guardian; Daily Mail; The Wall Street Journal; ITV; and Tottenham Hotspur's website to name but a few.
You can find out more about the project at the BBH Labs and Keep Aaron Cutting websites.
Incredibly well done Björn and Sophie. This is nothing short of brilliant.
