Inga misses out on creating a viral sensation

OMG! Sooooo peed off. I came up with this brilliant idea for my shampoo client but you're not going to believe what happened.

The brief was a really tough one and it grew out of a bunch of focus groups. The problem is we found lots of women, like my mum (who happened to be in the groups coz I had a really tight budget so I just got her and her mates from the Yagoona RSL) want to dye their hair but they can't be bothered paying all that money at the gay hairdressers so they do it themselves and then they're totes peed off coz the colour's all wrong.

Like, they want auburn (the colour, not the lebo suburb) but they end up going bright orange. Or they want ash blonde but they end up looking like that pommy pedo with the fat cigar (sooooo gross!)

Anyway, we decided we would launch our own range of colouring products but the hectic idea (which was mine!) was that they would come attached to the shampoo in a double-pack so you couldn't buy one without the other. Soooo cool.

I wrote this hectic brief and gave it to the creatives. Because there was no budget for media I told them they had to write a viral ad. As usual, the feral creatives came up with all these stupid ideas that had nothing to do with the product and suddenly it was the night before the presso and I had nothing!

So I sat down with my flatmate Jules and we cracked open a couple of bottles of Pinot Gris and came up with this fierce idea ourselves. I presented it the next morning (even though I had this massive hangover) and the client said it was the single best idea they'd ever seen in their careers and ECD came up to me after the meeting and said "Inga, you are a frigging genius! This is a dead certain Titanium! Book your ticket to Cannes, girly!".

Woo hoo! I was so excited! We rushed back to the agency and ECD said I could have the best animators and the best musos and whatever I wanted! He even said he had a special slush fund that only he and CEO knew about that he held in reserve for special creative projects that he knew were dead set award winners.

Anyway, for the next three weeks we worked on it around the clock. It was awesome! The song was amazing! The cartoons were hilarious! The whole idea was about all the stupid ways people go about dying their hair, when all they really need is our product. The cartoon showed all these silly little characters doing random stuff and the jingle was awesome. It was called "Dumb Ways To Dye."

And then the week before we were due to release it online some gay railway station did exactly the same campaign! Can you believe it? As if! ECD went totes berserk and said we'd be a laughing stock if we released ours so he canned the whole thing! All because of some random ad from Melbourne. And theirs didn't even make any sense coz nobody dyes their hair by sticking a fork in a toaster.

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