Every year hundreds of writers and thousands of visitors attend the Melbourne Writers Festival. What’s the connective tissue between writers and readers? Stories.
This year JWT Melbourne, the book-loving agency for the MWF for the past three years, thought of an ingeniously simple way of bringing stories to a new audience and publicising the Festival. Part of their Stories Unbound campaign, they call it Wi-Fiction -and for the duration of the Festival it surprised and delighted patrons in Melbourne’s cultural epicentre Federation Square. We’re pretty sure it’s first time anyone’s used wi-fi to tell stories.
Meet the Router Writer.
Melbourne Writers Festival holds events all over the city, but the Atrium at Federation Square is arguably the epicentre of the festival; a venue and meeting place. The space is home to some of Melbourne’s major galleries, cafes and specialty stores, including The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, with a steady flow of pedestrian traffic through the area.
As the public and festival-goers enjoy the space, they invariably take advantage of the free Wi-Fi on their smart-phones, iPads or laptops, and it’s here that ‘Router Writer’ (a MWF branded box in the Fed Sqaure Atrium containing five Wi-Fi routers) unexpectedly brings stories into their lives.
Asked to pick a network, they see that the list of Wi-Fi network names have seemingly conspired to create short but humourous stories. Each ‘Router Writer’ story ends with a call to action to visit either the Festival website or the Stories Unbound social media site.
More fun from the Stories Unbound campaign by JWT Melbourne.
- The 2011 cinema ad.
- The world’s first social-media platform for writing, reading and geotagging stories at storiesunbound.com.
- Its companion app.
Earlier this year, JWT Melbourne won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Design Lions for their 2010 Melbourne Writers Festival work (a lovely sample here). It was also the only Australian entry shortlisted in the prestigious Jay Chiat Awards for Strategic Excellence. Winners will be announced in October.
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[...] Although the video doesn’t necessarily clarify exactly how this functioned, here’s a link to a web write-up on nextness.com.au describing in more detail how this worked. The press called it a “literary innovation,” [...]