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 When searching for a new digital agency, Turkish Airlines decided to take a slightly different approach to the whole pitch process, it seems.
Instead of inviting the usual bunch of bozos agencies to come and talk at them for hours at a time, the airline sent them a puzzle – and expected them to solve it.
“The first thing we got in our hands was nothing but a two-page 'treasure map', which looked like a simple mind map with the keyword ‘thybrief’ at the centre and the most important social media sites linked around,” writes “Aycan” on Digithell.net, a McCann blog from Turkey, talking about Digital McCann’s path to the pitch.
The agency then managed to ferret out clues from websites including Flickr, Twitter, Blogspot, and so forth. But it got nerdier, and cleverer.
“With so many geeks around us, we discovered the password for the thybrief Gmail account hidden in the HTML source code of the thybrief blog. Then we seized Gmail, Google Docs and Mindmeister accounts for the user thybrief. So the puzzle is solved,” writes Aycan.
It’s like something Dan Brown might write. Except it makes more sense.
As Aycan notes, now all the agency has to do is come up with something good enough to impress the people that set this devilish puzzle - no small feat.
As far as we’re concerned, this is a very cool pitch process – especially as it really forces an agency to prove whether they “get” digital, and, not incidentally, whether they actually have brains as well.
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