The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2010
Tipp-Ex's interactive YouTube ad: viewers rewrite the title, get a new ending
Buzzman made YouTube itself the ad: viewers erase the video title with Tipp-Ex and type any verb to trigger a new ending.
Tipp-Ex (BIC Group)
What it had to solve
Tipp-Ex, Europe's correction-product leader, needed to promote its Pocket Mouse online during the back-to-school season and demonstrate what the product actually does.
How it works
For the 2010 back-to-school season, Tipp-Ex launched a YouTube film that looked like a casual hunting scene: a hunter meets a bear in the woods. Mid-scene he erases the video's own title with a Tipp-Ex roller and invites viewers to rewrite it.
Whatever verb viewers typed — 'wrestles', 'kisses', 'plays football', even 'time-travels' — the film re-edited itself to match, with more than 50 endings produced by French agency Buzzman together with film house Eleganz and digital studio Grouek. The sign-off 'Tipp-Ex, white and rewrite' turned the product's function into the ad's mechanic.
Published in September 2010, the ad spread rapidly and is widely cited as one of the first true interactive YouTube commercials, making the viewer a co-writer of the story.
Why it lands
- It proved the product's benefit — erase and rewrite — through the ad's own interaction rather than a spoken claim.
- Viewers became co-authors, and each personalized ending gave them a reason to watch again and share.
- The 50-endings mechanic rewarded replay and made the campaign's scale itself a talking point.
- It set the template for interactive YouTube advertising at a time when the format barely existed.
What it did
Over 46 million YouTube views and one million-plus Facebook shares; earned media worth €3.2 million; European sales rose 30% in September–October 2010, and the format became a template for interactive YouTube ads.
What you can take
When a product is small and invisible, let it perform the trick inside the medium itself: watching the correction tape rewrite the ad is a demonstration no voiceover could match.
Since then
The film earned a D&AD Pencil and spawned a 2012 sequel, 'A Hunter (Time Travels) With a Bear', again by Buzzman. For years afterward, choose-your-verb interactive films across categories cited it as the original, and Tipp-Ex became remembered as the brand that made correction tape the star of its own advertising.
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