Piquecos School

Dossier

The special merits of this case history are:

- The age of the creative team.

• Its very modest size and location.
• The low probability of such a team ever contributing to a major European Image Campaign.
• The high creativity involved
• The originality of the campaign
• The widespread use, at several levels of NTCs, both for the preparation and design of the Campaign and as the main tool for running the campaign itself.
• Hypermedia running on a variety of supports and circularity of the use of the network and the web.
• The multiplying effect of a free contribution resulting in high market value.

Piquecos, a village of 300 inhabitants is not to be found on most maps of France. Yet its local school of two classes, summing less than thirty pupils aged between 9 and 12, is a meeting point on the global web for French classes from many countries from all continents. A CD ROM on water designed and assembled by students of several countries was originally launched by the Piquecos small school.

More recently, in one of the most original publicity campaign designed to promote the awareness of telework in the Union, four attractive designs created by the Piquecos Pupils under the coaching of Professor Pierre Valade, were reproduced by six European telephone companies, on over four million phone cards. The originality of the campaign lays in the global use of the NTCs and INTERNET to produce the graphic material, to distribute it, to contact and convince the interested parties over thirteen countries, using fax and e-mail. Furthermore, the advertising support was used, not only for the message as occurs in most advertising campaigns, but also for linking the message back to the network in order to provide additional sources of information.

This multilevel "hypermedia" advertising campaign; the first to link six large telephone operators into a single European issue of 4 million printed messages on magnetic cards, the latter linked back to an URL and, through it, to a network of telework webpages, is possibly the first hyper-document involving such different and widespread supports.

This feat was made possible thanks to Schoolteacher Pierre Valade who, some years ago enlisted local support, and armed with one MacIntosh, brought the Piquecos school and its pupils in the XXI century.

Soon the webpage and electronic bulletin produced by the whole group of young cybernauts became world famous among French students, from Japan to Indonesia, Canada, South Africa and many other countries.

An intelligent combination of the best educational practices, (using traditional teaching materials such as, paper pencils, water-colours, blackboard etc.), with the empowerment of the new technologies, enabled the children to develop imagination and manual skills, producing creative ideas and designs, whilst at the same time publishing them world-wide, with the new tools of the global village (Never so well named in this case).

The Piquecos site soon became a favorite topic for interviews by the media, press radio and TV included.

It also became an obliged stop on the educational web. In its well designed pages, the young Piquecos team offered to design pages for free or for whatever the customer would find it worth paying. Thus the artistic team was found that could express the abstract meaning of telework into colourful, and spontaneous designs that instantly captivated the attention of the image and publicity experts of multinational companies.

Those images, not copyrighted and generously donated by the creative team, prompted the collaboration of the companies who in turn provided printed support worth over 250.000 Euro for free. The use of the network for co-ordination between Piquecos and six countries, and distance proofing and printing made the rest possible in a remarkably short time, meeting many deadlines.

The campaign, initiated in 1997 has gone on in 1998 out of its own strength, the Piquecos children designs having become a symbol in themselves.

Details and anecdotes of this most original campaign can be found on some webpages, but the full story of how 26 children designed over four million phone cards for six multinational companies, is still waiting to be told by a journalist or by a writer and to be used as a case history for the advertising industry.

Brief description of the project.

In order to obtain the support of, as many European telephone companies as possible, it was suggested that an Europe wide issue of pay telephone cards, announcing the European Telework Week should be launched around the month of November 1997, coinciding with the celebration of ETW97. In order to make this issue more attractive, to users and collectors, one main difficulty was to produce one or more original designs representing the abstract concept of Telework.

At the same time, the creation of the design itself should be an interesting story more likely to be reported in the press. Piquecos and it small school, already famous on INTERNET, supplied the images of Mr. Teleworker, seen in the minds of very young children as a snail carrying a Computer on its shell.

The proficiency of the junior team in all the aspects of the web, multimedia and telecommunications included made the rest possible.

The design was started in Jun 97 soon before the summer vacations, yet the team was able to create and submit four successive designs and send them converted in EPS professional files on IOMEGA diskettes to the six printing plans meeting nearly impossible deadlines. The enthusiasm generated by this happy and excited team motivated the high executive and experts of the telephone companies and, in several cases of their suppliers and advertising agents, to work overtime and fit the issue into overbooked schedules.

The Telephone cards also bore, beside the design and the mention of ETW97, the URL of a "one stop shopping" webpage, linked to the ETW site and many other national and international telework sites, thus extending the benefit and coverage of this campaign further than just its main objective: The European Telework Week.

Thus an image was publicised, giving at the same time access to a large amount of practical information available on the web. A measure of the success of the project is that it was also mentioned in the press including the prestigious Financial Times. In all, the wide support of this innovative campaign based on the skill and fame of the small Piquecos village, ran on over four million magnetic cards widely used by the public in six countries, was further supported on the web via linked sites, and produced several press articles. It was so satisfactory that two major telephone companies have decided to reproduce it in 1998 without further solicitation.

 Conclusion

The well deserved award would go a long way to compensate this magnificent effort that was offered for free to the advancement of telework by the young dwellers of a small European village not to be found on most maps.

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