#1341 2025 · Selleys Australia & Howatson+Company · Adhesives (construction marketing)
Selleys glued a kayak and a marlin to a billboard and let the public prove the glue
the problem
Builders distrust any claim of adhesive strength; Selleys was bought but never picked for the risky jobs
background
Construction adhesive is a saturated market and 'the strongest' is a claim every rival makes in identical marketing. Fieldwork showed Selleys was not being rejected but underestimated: its tubes sat on building sites yet were not chosen for the risky, load-bearing jobs where the penalty for a brand being weak is a failed fix. The buyers — builders and tradies — are a skeptics' audience: seeing is believing, and no superseded spec sheet about a paste is going to win the ones who have watched cheap glues fail.
The textbook response was a sharper claim — bigger numbers, a celebrity demonstration, a technical video — but that is another argument in the same subjective register as every rival's, aimed at people professionally trained not to trust it. The brand needed a way to make its strength stop being a statement and become a witnessed, hands-on fact.
what everyone would do
Print a bigger number, film a studio demonstration, or hire a celebrity to vouch for the strength. All fail with a trade audience because a superseded claim is still a claim: a bigger number is just a louder version of the same scepticism-bait, a studio demo is scripted and therefore dismissed, and a celebrity endorsement is a stranger's opinion a builder has no reason to weigh above his own.
what they saw
A trade audience does not believe strength because you say so; they believe it because they tried to break it and could not. Glue their prize to the claim and let their own failed pull become your proof.
the move
Selleys and agency Howatson+Company built a billboard that doubled as a live torture test: a kayak, an arcade machine, a cricket bat, a toolbox and a 2.8-metre mounted marlin were glued to the board using only Liquid Nails — up to 400kg holding power per square metre, no supports, no bolts, no tricks — and every object was stress-tested before going live so the bond could not fail. The public, tradies, influencers and Australia's second-strongest man were invited to pry the prizes free under the challenge 'if you can take it, it's yours'. Nothing moved, and each unscripted failed attempt, shot and shared from a busy Sydney road, became the proof itself.
why it works
The torture test converts a claim a builder is professionally trained to distrust into an outcome they personally generated and would remember. Because the objects were load-bearing prizes — a marlin, a kayak — they drew real pulls from strong, motivated people, and every failed attempt had to be explained as the glue winning, not the scene speeding. The honesty was load-bearing: the objects were pre-stressed so the bond could not fail, and the no-tricks experimental integrity is what lets a doubter conclude the strength is real rather than staged. On a busy road the content produced itself — each passerby's effort was an unscripted proof shot that could be shared raw, so the campaign's reach compounded without buying a claim of its own.
the payoff
Per the campaign it drew 47M organic views and a 5% sales rise; figures self-reported only. Took two Silver, one Bronze Spikes Asia 2026.
where it breaks
It only works when the audience genuinely disbelieves claim-words and the proof can be staged as a real, honest test — if objects were secretly bolted, the backfire is fatal and the scepticism spreads faster than the proof. It needs a crowd capable of genuinely trying to fail (against the second-strongest man the attempt must be plausible), a public site with foot and social traffic, and objects worth the pull. It proves a binary physical quality — strength, holds, stays — and says nothing useful for subjective claims like taste, beauty or speed, and it is expensive one-off theatre, not something that scales with every product.
what came after
The move turned marketing's core problem — nobody trusts the claim — into the marketing itself, letting a crowd's failed attempts supply the evidence that words could not.
references
- [1]Campaign Brief — Selleys Liquid Nails proves its unrivalled strength in unmissable stunt via Howatson+CoCampaign Brief (AU), 2025campaignbrief.com
- [2]famouscampaigns.com — Liquid Nails gets stuck in with the ultimate glue testfamouscampaigns.com, 2025famouscampaigns.com
Widely retold, only partly documented. Filed as hearsay.