Xerox recently launched a new integrated advertising campaign in North America that pokes fun at office life, while conveying the message that Xerox provides affordable color for the office.

The playful style of the campaign includes TV, print and interactive, and is targeted toward businesses of all sizes. The Affordable Color campaign emphasizes that any business can afford Xerox color, and this campaign delivers that message with both credibility and fun.
A funny thing happened to Xerox.

Its name became synonymous with photocopies as its brand became largely irrelevant to those making copies. Frugal Color, Y&R’s site for Xerox, is part of a campaign to make the Xerox brand relevant again by recasting it as an edgy outsider poking fun at corporate culture. Thanks to some high production values and good writing the recasting effort works.

In Choose Wisely, you are presented with four video dilemmas and it’s your job to pick the office worker who will have the best solution: the suckup manager, the lazy staff member or the clever IT worker. The predictability of the IT worker always being right might have worn thin had the video not been genuinely funny.

The Explore Frugality section contains some well thought out digital tchotchkes. I particularly liked the Mad Libs style fill in the blanks Conference Report and the Coffee Run PDFs. They were downloads that I could actually see people downloading and using, and they were clearly branded Xerox. I also enjoyed the Acronymanator, which takes any ten letter word (yes ANY, try it) and turns it into a vacuous business acronym (e.g., Streamlined Proprietary Aggressive Matrix.)

With the dollars being spent on online media, the level of effort put into this creative (and the related viral video at Extreme Offices), campaigns like this should be the norm for big brands, not the exception.