Creative marketing at the forefront
The nature of digital marketing requires that you constantly re-evaluate your strategy to stay fresh and relevant. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel everytime. Sometimes, all it takes is changing the tires, refuel your ride, and not be bogged down by conformity.
It’s difficult to come up with a solution that connects with your customer, increases your brand awareness, and boosts your revenue. Also, creative marketing takes courage. It’s easy to look at influential viral campaigns and wonder, It’s so obvious, why didn’t we propose that first!?
Wendy’s social takedowns of their competitors, Old Spice’s interactive quirky character and video response campaigns, they seem like obvious moves in hindsight. Indeed they were and still are groundbreaking.
Depending on traditional strategies for your marketing campaign can help you produce results gradually and steadily. But it’s doing something different that will help you stand out. Conforming to tried tactics ensures your current success. On the other hand, creativity will ensure your sustainability in a market driven by new ideas and untold stories. Below are a few great stories to inspire you.
Inside Chanel
Alongside Chanel News, Inside Chanel is a microsite. It is dedicated to telling the story of the brand – a key part of its overarching marketing strategy. Divided into 12 chapters, each reveals an important part of the brand’s history. It offers something of true value for customers. Combining photography, digital sketches and video – it uses valuable content to bring the story to life. With 100 years of history, the in-depth and well-produced essence of the campaign also exhibits the quality of the brand.
Key takeaways
There is no substitute for creating rich meaningful content. Our agency can help you conceive some remarkably creative marketing content! We love to research, gather user insights, then use these in innovative ways.
Google: “Building a Better Bay Area”
Corporate philanthropy is definitely on the rise. Between 2012 and 2014, many companies increased their charitable giving, and Google was no exception. The search engine giant gave away $5.5 million to Bay Area nonprofits. In that context, they let the public decide where that money would go — in an unconventional, interactive way.
Google allowed people to cast their votes online, but they also wanted to involve the Bay Area community in a tangible way. So they installed large, interactive posters — in places like bus shelters, food trucks, and restaurants — that locals could use to vote for a cause. In a video, the narrator notes that this experience reaches “people when they had the time to make a difference.” In San Francisco, finding people waiting for the bus or going to food trucks is pretty much a given. So, while they were already there, Google set up a few opportunities to:
- Learn about and vote for local nonprofits.
- Interact with the brand in a way that doesn’t require using its products.
- Indirectly learn about Google’s community outreach.
With the help of the online voting integration — and a branded hashtag: #GoogleImpactChallenge. The campaign ended up generating 400,000 votes over the course of about three and a half weeks.
Key takeaways
- Create a branded hashtag that participants can utilise to share the experience on social media. Then, make sure you’ve integrated an online element that allows people to participate when they learn about it this way.
- Known as engagement marketing, this take on creative marketing invites an audience to interact with a business in a real-world situation. Find out where your audience is already hanging out and engage with them in person if possible. Add that human touch for a change, instead of trying to reach them in the usual ways.
LinkedIn: “In It Together”
In 2018, powerhouse social media network LinkedIn emerged to abandon its then white collar stereotype. The brand launched a TV spot titled “In it Together” during the Golden Globes award show. It was an advertising move uncharacteristic of the brand in the past. LinkedIn is trying to break away from its current perception. The “In It Together” campaign features a diverse range of people and businesses.
The campaign represents LinkedIn’s first real integrated marketing effort and also includes online video, digital display, paid social media, outdoor ads, podcasts, radio spots, partnerships, and search engine marketing.
Key takeaways
Tell real stories about real people. Humanise the brand, producing emotions and encouraging empathy.
Coca-Cola revives Christmas truck tour
If you were to ask someone to describe Coca-Cola’s Christmas advertisement, most would be able to do so in a heartbeat. Red trucks speed through a snowy landscape, igniting up the towns as they go. The advertisement might be 21 years old, but interest in it shows little sign of waning. It still brings out everyone’s nostalgic side. Coca-Cola last year revamped its Christmas campaign ‘Holidays Are Coming’, this time making Coca-Cola Zero Sugar the star of its marketing in a bid to reach a new audience and reconnect them with the brand ahead of the festive period.
The Coca-Cola truck tour returned, with the new Coke Zero as the focus with the trucks branded with the no-sugar drink.
“Our challenge every year is to take a tradition that is loved by many and bring it to life in new ways that feel fresh and relevant, especially to our core target audience – young adults,” Alec Mellor, marketing manager at Coca-Cola GB, says. “This year also marks a significant shift for Coca-Cola as zero sugar will be the Christmas campaign hero – connecting with consumers who have made zero sugar their drink of choice.”
Key takeaways
Sometimes creativity lies in what you have done before and maybe it is a good idea to revive it back again.
BMW films
How often have you come across a company that pours $17 million into a brand campaign that involves destroying its product?
But that’s exactly what Fallon and BMW did with “The Hire”, a web-based series of short films that broke every rule in the book on its way to becoming a Harvard Business School case study and the first campaign ever to win a Titanium Lion at Cannes.
Instead of using one big-name director, “The Hire” collaborated with several. Under the watch of Anonymous Content co-founder David Fincher, “The Hire” secured icons to tell the story of a nameless man who transports people or cargo from one place to another in his BMW.
Instead of lingering, loving looks at the car’s curves, the shorts featured plenty of footage of BMWs getting smashed, shot at and damaged as they sped in and out of danger. And instead of sharing them through a traditional channel, Fallon put “The Hire” shorts online, four years before the launch of YouTube.
Letting creativity run crazy
On paper, “The Hire” looked like a crazy idea, but it was backed by sturdy insights. Jim McDowell, then VP-marketing for BMW, had commissioned research back in 2000 that suggested web video could reach many more people than even a large traditional platform like a Super Bowl commercial. He also knew that 75% of BMW owners were already visiting BMW’s website and that 85% of car purchasers visited a maker’s website before heading to a showroom.
“That’s why we thought we could bet the ranch,” Mr McDowell said.
“BMW Films is the first great example of branded content in the 21st century. It woke the industry up to what’s possible and made everyone jealous,” wrote judge Robert Wong, executive creative director, Google Creative Lab.
But things came together in the end, and the results sparkled. Carmakers from Audi to Suzuki followed with obvious imitations; Luc Besson, a director that Mr Fincher approached about directing a spot, instead unveiled “The Transporter”, a feature film that owes its entire conceit to “The Hire”.
Five years after the campaign concluded, people were still telling Mr McDowell how much they’d loved “The Hire”, and folks on the creative side were receiving their rewards for much longer.
Key takeaways
Do your research right. Know your statistics and utilise them in the most out of the box creative way possible. If you have the appetite for taking risks, with a well-researched backing, creativity is the next step to take.
graphility is your solution to creative marketing. We believe and thrive in our creative concepts. Try us! Explore our website, visit our portfolio, our case studies. You will know what we mean. Leave your comments here.