Creative Corner: Bonfire Night for dogs, Uber Eats for runners and Norway's loos with views

Bonfire Night has been extended to a month, without a vote, and the dogs have not taken it well.

Many have been wide-eyed and shaking since, well, before the 5th. From a dog’s point of view, it’s been a week of unexpected doorbells, bangs and, as of Sunday, Christmas music. In between, there’s also a presidential insult about toilets and a marathon made entirely of snacks. 

I’ve kept Christmas out of this one, as I’m a bit of a traditionalist that way (unlike whoever’s getting Celebrations’ 54-day Christmas calendar). 

Lots to cover, so here’s what stood out.

Uber Eats makes the marathon a lot more digestible

Created with Hope&Glory, Uber Eats has put on a marathon you can eat your way through. Run clubs are now as much about the social as the running, and Uber Eats has put a menu on it.

The Morsel Marathon swaps 26.2 miles for 26 food stops across London (Time Out reckons that’s a snack roughly every 0.4km), and there’s not an energy gel in sight: runners get gyoza, pastries and green juices from the likes of Pizza Pilgrims, GAIL’s, wagamama and Beigel Bake, plus independents such as Coqfighter, Murger Han and Sandwich Sandwich.

I’ll declare an interest: it finished at Protein Studios, my office, so this one found me. Charlie Dark MBE of Run Dem Crew mapped the route, and it launched on Sunday 1st November with hundreds of runners from London’s run clubs. It’s about seven miles a lap, so a full marathon works out at somewhere between three and four laps (Uber Eats says three and a half, ending at SushiDog).

It’s open to everyone now. The first 100 people to finish the route and tag their Strava to Uber Eats UK on Instagram win £262 in Uber Eats credit (presumably a nod to the 26.2), and the equivalent of 150,000 meals goes to food redistribution charity City Harvest.

It’s billed as a world first, which surprised me, because the idea isn’t new: New York’s Bakery Run had 17,000 people apply for 100 places, and the same team took it to LA this spring. What Uber Eats has added is scale and the right partner—Run Dem Crew has been around since 2007, well before the run club boom, and was set up for people who don’t think of themselves as runners (so, me). Nor is it Uber Eats’ first lap of a Marathon: in April, it teamed up with Boots on a £10 Supporter Survival Kit for London Marathon spectators. Now it’s feeding the runners, naturally.

Visit Norway turns Trump’s insult into a loo with a view

At a rally in Michigan at the end of October, Donald Trump, still sore about missing out on the Nobel Peace Prize, called Norway a ‘shithouse country’. The prize is awarded by an independent committee, not the Norwegian government, as Norway’s foreign minister was quick to point out. Visit Norway took him at his word.

Its reply was a guide to ‘the world’s most beautiful and spectacular toilets’, with the line ‘Norway makes shithouses great again’. The loos are real and scenic, including the Golden Toilet on Senja, a triangular building clad in gold coloured material, and Ureddplassen, a wave-shaped stop overlooking the sea. Evgenia Egorova of Visit Norway says it took little more than some DIY humour and good architecture, and AP reports the team had already made something similar for World Toilet Day a few years ago, so the cupboard wasn’t bare, I suppose. 

The toilet page picked up more than 80,000 views from over 170 countries in five days. A gold example of quick wit and even quicker turnaround to ride the wave before it disappears when he next speaks.

Add Norway’s golden toilet to the blue wave and it’s been quite a week for the ‘failed lame duck’ (Ossoff’s phrase), with timing that couldn’t have been better.

Guide Dogs leads the way through Bonfire Night

As the owner of an anxious rescue, this one is close to my heart, and I’m in good company: Guide Dogs’ research puts firework anxiety at nearly two-thirds of the UK’s dogs—around 9.9 million.

Guide Dogs pre-launched the National Fireworks Archive in August, which is the right call, because desensitisation can take up to three months and the worst time to start is the week of the bangs. 

Created with TinMan, it’s billed as the UK’s first crowd-sourced canine desensitisation tool: a free training video made from real fireworks footage filmed by the public, arranged by sound intensity so owners can start quiet and build up, with Guide Dogs’ training advice alongside. Guide Dogs’ research found 79% of owners do nothing to prepare, and 35% didn’t know dogs could be desensitised at all.

The crowdsourcing is a great touch. 

Guide Dogs found trainers’ own CD of firework sounds lost the element of surprise, because the dogs learned the sequence of bangs, and real clips from real gardens fix that. The average UK adult has seven minutes of fireworks footage on their phone, so there’s no shortage of supply, and anyone can add to it, which keeps it growing long after Bonfire Night, and makes it a long-term project.

This week the coverage went up a gear: national morning TV, mentions on the BBC, and a dedicated piece in The Times, where a spaniel called Wellington visits Guide Dogs HQ and responds to a sparkler by retreating to a corner. There was plenty more in the nationals too, all pointing owners to the archive ahead of the big night.

It isn’t the most creative campaign this week, and Bonfire Night is full of dogs-and-fireworks campaigns (Classic FM’s Pet Classics is back for three evenings with a new piano piece, When The Night Goes Quiet, pressed onto zoetrope vinyl). 

But this is a masterclass in useful content and media relations: a long run-up, a real insight, an audience that can take part and advice you can actually use. 

It’s too late for desensitisation this year, according to the Guide Dogs trainer in The Times, but not for New Year’s Eve. So check your camera roll. There’s a decent chance you’re sitting on a nervous dog’s training programme!

That’s it for this week’s Creative Corner!

If you’ve seen something that’s caught your eye, or if you’ve been working on something you’re particularly proud of, please do get in touch via emily.barnes@fanclubpr.com. I’d love to hear about it.