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These are fun times for advertising. Until ten years ago, there was a proven formula of success in advertising and every competitive brand would pick it and spew it across television, billboards and radio. After the coming of web 2.0, fresh marketing has become a lot more plausible. Youtube advertising is giving marketers a longer time to say their story. The lifespan of campaigns has decreased and hence you can afford to take the risk of doing something totally crazy. Crazy enough to go viral.
Some such off-beat marketing moves this year have really caught our attention. You are going to love how these brands actually thought fresh and transformed regular situations into marketing opportunities.
1. Crying babies fetched JetBlue’s passengers discount on Mother’s Day
On Mother’s Day, JetBlue took the opportunity to change our attitude towards crying babies and accept them with a smile (in fact it made people secretly wish for them to cry). We’re sure the odd-200 people on board who got to fly free because of crying babies on their flight, are going to find joy each time they hear babies crying. But even the millions of people who saw the commercial are going to think of JetBlue each time they encounter a baby on the plane. Genius!
2. Adobe celebrated stocky photographs by launching a fashion line around them. Pun intended
Every marketer has spent some time trying to look through stock photographs in hope for one which is less “stocky” and might just work with a few tweaks. In the effort, we encounter some classic stereotypical photographs that continue to haunt us for days to come. To promote their new stock photo service, Adobe Stock, Adobe designed a tongue-in-cheek fashion line that features outdated, overused stock photos. Point made.
3. A fruit drink brand got more than 50000 people to share tongue-in-cheek compliments online
Innocent drinks launched the Chain of Good campaign, in January across TV, print, BTL and digital. Innocent donates 10% of all its profits to charity. Thus, buying an innocent drink starts the chain of good. And this message was brought to life by an online experiential campaign of actually giving “innocent” compliments to your friends on Twitter and Facebook and make them feel good too! Engagement at its best!
4. Burger King pulled off a Halloween prank on… you guessed it, Mc Donalds!
Burger King and McDonald’s rivalry is huge, and it’s fun to watch how they keep taking digs at each other whenever given the chance. The home of the Whopper picked Halloween 2016 to play a prank on the Golden Arches.
A Burger King location in Queens, NY dressed up the entire restaurant as “The Ghost of McDonald’s”, sweeping a massive white ghost costume over the building and adding a saucy message to their sign: “Booooooo! Just kidding, we still flame grill our burgers. Happy Halloween.” Not extremely creative, but fresh indeed. And we’re sure that particular outlet saw a lot of business around then. Not to mention the respect earned from all the sneaky Halloween pranksters who got to know of the move.
5. Always – Played #LikeAGirl
Talking about gender stereotypes is not fresh. But highlighting how stereotypes exist in something we use every 11 minutes definitely calls for attention. Always showed how the emojis in our mobile phones showed women doing feminine things. Not that anybody is complaining, but it was definitely a great move to strike a chord with its target audience, younger women with big aspirations and strong opinions. And a great hashtag like that helped soar Instagram engagement much.
6. Make shopping healthy, literally! Lipton’s shopping cart will help you burn calories.
To encourage consumers to make healthier choices while shopping for groceries, Lipton Green Tea created a shopping cart that tracks your steps, calories burned, and time spent moving at the grocery store. Aimed at people who live busy lives and don’t find time to exercise, the calorie meter on the cart gets them to think twice before adding something to it. No prizes for guessing how many shoppers then dropped Lipton Green Tea to their carts! Brand positioning, engagement and sales, all rolled into one cart.
In fact, we did some fresh thinking ourselves for one of our clients in Vancouver, a known name in IT service handling. Quicktech wanted it’s office facade to display its branding such that people would take notice. We used it as an opportunity to do more than just that. If you’ve been in the area, you sure won’t miss Quicktech’s office that reminds you how I.T. can make things fall together.
If you found these campaigns inspiring, do share this article with others. If you have some more campaigns to add to it, let’s get social on Facebook or Twitter. If you just want to drop by and have a little marketing chit-chat with us, leave us a note here. We’d love to hear your brand story.