SPIRITBRIDGE Marketing Director, Gemma Monaghan Gilbert highlights some of her preferred recent digital marketing campaigns of 2023.
Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's ... computer generated?
Marketing campaigns should excite, captivate and ideally, in order to truly gain cut through and to achieve that all important ‘viral’ reach brands aspire to nowadays, be as disruptive as hell.
Hats off then, to Maybelline, who didn’t just tick every one of those boxes, but positively punched through each of them, with their recent OOH campaign for their Sky High Mascara.
Only…it transpired to actually be a digital campaign disguised as an OOH campaign.
Clever. Very clever.
A video, posted to Maybelline’s social media platforms, showed a London Tube train pulling into a station. A giant mascara wand positioned on the station wall awaits and as the tube reaches the platform, giant lashes fixed to the top of the tube carriage, brush into the wand, mimicking the effect that the product has on eyelashes, making them sway back and forth, satisfyingly.
Another similar example displays the same set up on an iconic red London bus and the caption alludes that the beauty brand are taking over the UK capital with their OOH campaign.
The video was watched by 74 million Instagram users alone, with hundreds of thousands sharing across their own platforms and countless media titles picking up the campaign. I shared it in my own WhatsApp group of marketing peers. Consumers ran to tube stations in the hope of clapping eyes on the vehicle interactive billboards that had been adorning their phone screens for days.
Only…they weren’t there. Because they didn’t exist.
The activation was CGI.
A digital stunt created entirely for social platforms by video production artist, Ian Padgham.
However, the visibility of the campaign, which also included a New York bus, globally surpassed anything that even a great local market OOH campaign would have achieved, at a fraction of the cost and continues to leave its mark on consumers some weeks later. In fact the news that it wasn’t real, only created further furor and extended the coverage and reach of the campaign.
Which begs the question: “Does it even need to happen in reality as long as it happens online?”
Of course, the answer is yes, we still need traditional methods of marketing and indeed, not all digital stunts can go viral. However, the exciting space of striking, sharable and scalable digital marketing continues to grow and expand. Much to the delight of excitable marketeers.
Look Up
One OOH campaign that definitely did ‘land’ on tangible billboards was the British Airways #LookUp campaign. Interactive billboards showed a toddler doing what all toddlers do, pointing to an aircraft flying overhead…only the plane was real. The ad used flight data and impeccable timing to display the destination, departure location or occasionally the temperature at the destination of the flight or the lowest price point of flights to said destination, just to really take advantage of our wet British Summer as a marketing lever to encourage spontaneous BA flight bookings. Billboards went live at London’s Piccadilly Circus as well as Chiswick back in 2013 and have continued to do so ever since, persistently stirring up news and visibility online as they do, hence it falling into my own lap this Summer.
Using this kind of data led technology was a first for British advertising in the campaign by Ogilvy agency.
This, combined with the relatability of the nostalgic, childlike excitement and wonder of a flight’s origin and destination provoked simply by sight of an aircraft created an unstoppable duo of pleasure pillars and the campaign, deservedly went viral.
A clever use of technology and traditional emotional marketing that resulted in impactful output.
Absolut-ly Iconic
Social listening is a digital tool that can be and indeed, should be, used across all channels of FMCG in the modern age.
From innovation to marketing and sales, utilising methods that allow current trends to influence how we innovate and how we speak to consumers, is invaluable. Creating relevant products and communicating to our target consumers is at the basis of our roles within the industry and ensures a flying start to NPD.
Earlier this year, Heinz’s innovation team did some of their own social listening to explore what pasta sauces were trending on social media, following the launch of their own pasta sauce range in 2022, for which they were looking to drive awareness. They discovered Penne alla Vodka, which had gone viral back in 2020 after Gigi Hadid cooked the dish on her social platform.
What followed was a partnership of two brands, completely iconic in their respective categories and recognised globally. Absolut Heinz pasta sauce was born (along with a Waitrose exclusive).
The strength of creating a product that is culturally significant, along with the partnership of two iconic brands resulted in incredibly compelling visuals, that really didn’t need explaining. The merging of the taglines, to the brand fonts and even pantones seemed so effortless that it made you wonder why they hadn’t collaborated sooner…and even if they had and it perhaps had been something you’d been subconsciously looking at on shelves for years. A match made in tomato based heaven.
The campaign, of course, went viral. 500 million social media impressions and a sell out of the limited edition product. More importantly though, the original Heinz pasta sauce range that the team were looking to amplify awareness of? Up 52% in sales.
A fantastic campaign, demonstrating the importance of social listening and cultural significance.
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