‘Crap’ contest spurs 100 percent employee message retention

Ervin & Smith pokes fun at traditional employee communication with a cleverly named contest

A couple years ago, the executive management team at Omaha, Neb.-based Ervin & Smith Advertising and Public Relations came up with new company core values.

The hope, naturally, was that the values would help boost employee productivity and motivate teams to produce breakthrough advertising and marketing ideas for the agency and its clients.

But the agency didn’t want to take the usual path in communicating the values to employees.

“We knew we wanted to implement an internal employee motivation campaign, but we felt the typical corporate ‘mission-vision-values’ communications would be viewed as cliched and wouldn’t work in our culture,” explains Kristin Petrick, director of strategy. “So we flipped the traditional employee communication campaign upside down and came up with C.R.A.P.”

The team hoped that the acronym—short for creativity, resourcefulness, accountability and passion—would get employees attention. To keep it, they launched a kick-off contest.

Launching the crap