Searching for artistic advertising and marketing marketing campaign concepts? What if I advised you that there was a literal pageant of creativity that celebrated the most important and greatest advertising and marketing campaigns, and laid their secrets and techniques of success?
There may be! It’s, in fact, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. They lately introduced the winners for 2015, and aside from a number of breakout hits just like the notorious ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, they’re principally large in scope with a price range to match.
However you don’t want to put down tens of millions to run campaigns which can be artistic and efficient.
Nice concepts are nice concepts, and you may make them work with any price range. So steal these classes from the Cannes 2015 award winners, and make them part of your subsequent marketing campaign.
One thing for each display
There was simply two screens that you would anticipate finding your viewers in entrance of: their tv or their PC. The rise of laptops that might be used anyplace added a wrinkle to this framework, however the domination of cell fully decimated it.
As a result of cell gadgets can be utilized in so many locations and conditions it’s almost not possible to guess a person’s context and mindset whereas utilizing one.
The proliferation of cell has been a sore spot for a lot of conventional advertisers, who’ve didn’t adapt to the brand new setting. Division retailer chain John Lewis, whose Christmas commercials have develop into a significant a part of the vacations in the UK, deserves credit score for evolving with the occasions.
John Lewis’ The Bear and the Hare marketing campaign, launched in Christmas 2013, was forward of its time even by 2015 requirements — as one would possibly hope with a whole marketing campaign price range of virtually $11 million.
A video breaking down the main points of the Bear and the Hare marketing campaign.
The core of the Bear and the Hare marketing campaign was a superbly animated commercial, unsurprisingly starring a bear and a hare. There was tie-in merchandise that fully offered out of shops.
One of many marketing campaign’s most distinguishing traits is that it had one thing for each context — together with each display.
Along with the commercials on tv (and, in fact, YouTube), there have been additionally tightly built-in social media campaigns, a single by Lily Allen, and a narrated e-book for tablets.
All of this ensured that John Lewis may maintain followers engaged with its marketing campaign it doesn’t matter what kind of machine they had been utilizing.
Give one thing for (nearly) nothing
In a determined bid to get their hashtags into our tweets, manufacturers continuously ask clients to “share their story.” So clichéd is that this call to action {that a} Tumblr exists solely to mock it.
However these tales are very not often fascinating, and aren’t your actual concern; what you’re actually after is the notice generated by somebody sharing your marketing campaign with their social circle. So why not merely reward the act of sharing itself?
That’s what Lay’s did with their “Tweet to Eat” marketing campaign, which concerned them putting in merchandising machine/video commercial hybrids at numerous bus stops within the UK.
The video screens served as a window right into a chamber by which British sportscaster Gary Lineker is trapped, alone together with his copy of Warfare and Peace, pleading so that you can tweet in order that he might bestow upon you a complimentary bag of chips.
It’s just a bit unsettling.
The participant will get to expertise one thing novel and enjoyable, will get a free bag of chips, and has an incentive to inform all her followers concerning the marketing campaign. It’s a win for everybody.
This tactic doesn’t solely apply to elaborate, bodily experiences; you’ll be able to leverage social sharing as a option to unfold phrase about your gated content material, whereas giving your viewers a frictionless method of acquiring it. We’ve even executed it on one of our own landing pages:
Presenting sharing as an choice in various to one thing else is a win-win: you get the possibility to succeed in somebody who might have been unwilling to supply their electronic mail, they usually inform their pals about your content material, all whereas making a alternative they be ok with.
Mock the machine
Within the web age, with data flowing freely about all types of media, shoppers have extra consciousness than ever about how promoting works and simply how typically they’re subjected to it. And so they’re not tremendous glad about it.
That’s why promoting that acknowledges its inherent inconvenience, or makes mild of the promoting machine itself, has been successful the reward of shill-weary shoppers.
Geico’s award-winning idea started with one common reality: everybody hates pre-roll advertisements.
Even probably the most ardent entrepreneurs skip them, anxious to hearken to the newest scorching single, watch the information or have their endorphins set ablaze by the newest lovable animal.
So Geico crams all the advert into these first 5, infuriatingly unskippable seconds, and rubs it in your face: “You possibly can’t skip this advert, as a result of it’s already over.” However you recognize it can’t be so.
You, humble dot with the crimson street in your rearview mirror, can see the expanse of gray freeway forward.
This accomplishes what most pre-roll advertisements may by no means hope to do: it convinces you to not skip the advert. And it rewards you for doing so, treating you to hilarious eventualities by which the advert’s characters freeze in place, whereas the world of the commercial continues unabated round them.
A canine, unhindered by the social decorum of his masters, jumps onto the eating desk and devours its bounty. A vacuum races away to an unknown frontier. And, uh, this:
By overtly acknowledging the ache of pre-roll advertisements and delivering one thing that’s truly value sticking round for, Geico is ready to join with an viewers that might have in any other case rejected them with out hesitation.
Mocking the world’s most reviled advert format is one factor, however what about taking over the most important, most braggadocious promoting occasion of the 12 months?
Heineken’s Newcastle Brown Ale — a model whose prime demographic might be actually into the sportsball — framed their If We Made It marketing campaign across the absurdity of promoting through the Tremendous Bowl.
Reasonably than run an advert through the huge recreation, they designed a marketing campaign across the advert they’d have made, may they’ve afforded to. It was full with summer season blockbuster storyboards, scathing focus teams and Academy-award successful actress Anna Kendrick, pretending (or perhaps not) to be furious over not showing in an precise Tremendous Bowl industrial.
They pulsed the snippets out by every day movies through the week main as much as the sport, making certain that the marketing campaign had legs longer than its runtime.
The result’s infinitely extra memorable than one more whiz-bang 30-second advert in a sea of whiz-bang 30 seconds advertisements.
Grasp the artwork of interception
Along with producing a genuinely humorous marketing campaign, Newcastle additionally managed to make themselves part of the Tremendous Bowl promoting dialog with out truly having to run a Tremendous Bowl advert.
However that’s not even the craziest story of Tremendous Bowl promoting interception — Volvo managed to leverage their competitor’s commercials as a part of their very own marketing campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZe1rVgT0WE
Volvo needed to get the phrase about their new XC60 mannequin, however like Newcastle, couldn’t afford to run a Tremendous Bowl advert of their very own. However moderately than making a sprawling, hypothetical marketing campaign, Volvo settled for one thing a lot less complicated: a hashtag.
Volvo piggy-backed on their opponents’ Tremendous Bowl advertisements with a easy proposition to the general public: tweet #VolvoContest mentioning somebody in your life who deserves the brand new Volvo, they usually simply would possibly get it.
Besides, you’ll be able to solely do it whereas a automobile industrial is airing through the huge recreation. In Volvo’s personal phrases, “When Lexus spent $4.5 million for this [Super Bowl ad], Twitter appeared like this:”
The outcomes spoke for themselves: as much as 2,000 Tweets per minute, about Volvo, throughout different automobile corporations’ advertisements. Superior for Volvo and #volvocontest, which ended up trending nationally and globally through the #superbowl, and a giant “ouch” for everybody else.
Whereas Volvo took benefit of their opponents’ advert spots, it not less than got here up with its personal hashtag. One of many extra controversial strategies of selling interception is hashtag-jacking, which suggests co-opting an already-popular hashtag on your personal use.
That is nearly universally irritating and in poor style, however there was not less than one group with a mission worthy of intercepting certainly one of Instagram’s hottest hashtags, #nofilter, which is used when a photograph has had no filter utilized.
This hashtag has been used on Instagram over 131 million occasions and Waves For Water — a company whose mission is to get clear water to these in want — co-opted it for his or her NoFilter initiative.
Their marketing campaign guarantees to implement one water filter in an space of want for each 1 million #nofilter makes use of on Instagram. Every filter is able to producing 1 million gallons of fresh water. 1 point out = 1 gallon.
For a trigger this essential, one is prepared to miss the modest crime of hashtag-jacking.
“Context” is extra essential than “price”
The shared thread between all of those campaigns?
It wasn’t nearly nice messaging or a killer worth proposition. And regardless of the excessive manufacturing worth of a few of these campaigns, it wasn’t how about how a lot they spent, both. It was about discovering novel methods to develop into part of conversations and actions that their audiences had been already engaged in, with out seeming intrusive.
Now greater than ever, advertising and marketing isn’t nearly how a lot you’ll be able to spend to get the phrase out — it’s about whether or not the phrase you’re spreading is fascinating to anybody however your self.