The Clink is a restaurant within the walls of HMP Brixton, Cardiff, Styal and High Down. It aims to help inmates escape a life of crime by giving them the opportunity to achieve City and Guilds NVQ’s in food service and food preparation. The results? An 87.5% success rate in reducing reoffending and a unique fine dining experience for visitors. It’s an amazing story. Our task was to tell it in and drive people into the restaurants. But we only had a limited budget. So we decided to target journalists and food critics and use their voice to tell the story through positive reviews and news articles. We sent them invitations in the form of a book, with a specially designed ‘Clink’ dust jacket, and secreted a silver knife and fork within the pages. What better way invite them to ‘dig in’ and gain some great PR in the process?

Journalists get bombarded with mailers all the time. Some they don’t even open. So to make ours stand out – we disguised it. We made it look like something they had ordered themselves from Amazon. A book. The outer packaging had to look authentic right down it’s satisfying tear open strip. Inside the book looks and feels like a classic, weighty, hard back crime novel with glossy dust jacket and dark brooding photography over an embossed spine and cloth finish. ‘Did I order this?’ the recipient would ask themselves. ‘This looks interesting.’ The stark typography hints at an interesting read inside – until it’s opened and reveals the secret therein.