Today, the Ad Club of New Orleans hosted George Nguyen, Director of Group Planning for Strawberry Frog, an independent Advertising Agency in New York City.

We have all been to these types of luncheons before: Bad food, boring speakers, pretending to like the other people at your table, you know the drill.

Ok, so it wasn’t earth shattering but sometimes when you have the bar set so low even the slightest exceeding of expectations appears groundbreaking.

What Mr. Nguyen did this afternoon was simple. He showed us that there are Advertising Agencies out there who are willing to take chances and more importantly, clients who enable those agencies to do so. Coming up with innovative and creative solutions to our clients marketing conundrums often is the easy part. Convincing them to pull the trigger on something “different” … now that is what has us banging our heads against the wall on a daily basis.

Take the above YouTube video. This was a campaign they launched on behalf of Microsofts new Accounting Software. The goal was to have 500,000 people download the new free software online. Accounting software. Not exactly sexy. Because the software was geared towards small businesses, they came up with an idea. Let’s have a nationwide contest to see who has the best new business idea.

So far, it all sounds pretty traditional… that is until you discover this fact: They drove 1.5 million users to download the free software in just two months, 3 times more than what their goal was for the entire year and they did so without purchasing one single GRP.

Enter, the Antishirt. StrawberryFrog created a campaign for a fictional new business idea, a T-shirt that only covers the parts a normal T-shirt doesn’t: Basically, the neck and arms, leaving the chest and back completely bare. The faux commercial for the antishirt created a huge online buzz and helped to drive traffic to the Ideawins.com website where users could download the software and enter to win the Big Idea contest.

When you think small business accounting software, you don’t typically think of a shirtless potbellied man with a farmers tan, but therein lies the beauty of non-traditional media.