10. BPost: Live Webshop

To prove how good they are at delivering your packages the Belgian Post Office set up the Live Webshop a kind of auction house that allowed viewers to buy items at discount prices. The viewer watch the shopping and shipping process live and the item was delivered overnight. It had some great results too – over 260,000 people visited the webshop online and brand awareness increased by 65%.

9. Microsoft, Film Poster, Kit Kat: Free Wifi

Is free Wifi a big deal? With data plans coming down in price and free wifi zones available in many place I would have thought not. However, this caught my eye from Microsoft. They turned a page in Forbes magazine into a free wifi hotspot that stays active for 15 days and has a battery that enables full time useage for up to three hours.

On a similar note a Korean film poster also provided free wifi for people in the immediate area. Once logged in the user can watch a trailer of the film from the poster and even buy tickets for the show. It’s a nice link up that might work for a younger demographic.

Also on the Wifi buzz last month was Kit Kat. Unlike the above two examples Kit Kat wanted us to take a break from surfing with a twist on the two concepts above. Their’s featured a sign that jam’s all signal for a five meter radius.

Check them out below.

8. Metservice.com: Outdoor Billboard

How do you communicate the accuracy of your online weather service in Auckland, a city where the weather changes frequently? An outdoor billboard of course.

7. Maes Beer: Free Keg

It may be the 2nd biggest best selling beer Belgium but the market leader outsells Maes by 4 to 1. Maes also happens to be the third most popular surname in the country so why not give a free keg of ‘Family Pride’ (see what they did there?) to everyone with the Maes surname? An expensive stunt that brought the Maes’s (see what I did there?) together to enjoy a keg of free beer. A Facebook app was a critical component with 500,000 using the app and Facebook fans tripled within a day. So there’s no mention of any sales figures right after the stunt, maybe it’s too soon to tell but it is strange to frame the case study with ‘it’s being outsold 4 to 1’ and then not come back with anything else. While stunts like these can also be measured in PR terms (awareness, free publicity etc.) the cold hard fact of the matter is the long term benefits of single stunts are small and require frequent future stunts to maintain a high level of brand awareness. Who would say no to a free keg?

6. Cornetto: Lick Challenge

I like this, it’s simple, fun easy to take part in and… my God isn’t his tongue only massive?

5. Coke, Heineken & Budwesier: Interactive Bottles

More and more non-digital items are becoming digitally enabled and this past month has brought three examples from Heineken, Coke and Budweiser. The former has produced a bottle that interacts with other bottles, people and even the music. Pretty interesting idea that will get cut through amongst the target 18-25 y/o clubbers. Coke has a bottle that records and remixes the sound around you when a bottle is opened. It’s then played back when you open it again. The premise being you’re reliving that happiness moment built as a result of the anticipation of drinking the drink. Budweiser have taken the Heineken idea a little further with their ‘Buddy Cup’ this is actually hooked up to your Facebook account and enables you to become friends with the person you clink glasses with. And you though Facebook photos of the night before were bad!

4. Durex: Funderwear

A ‘Durexperiment’ that allows an app user to ‘touch’ their partner via sensors in her funderwear. Gimmick? Yes. Do you want to try this? Yes.

3. Nike: Air Max PhotoID

It’s been possible to customise Nike apparel for some time using Nike ID. This new iteration synchs with a users Instagram account to customise one of the new Air Max trainers to match the colours of a chosen photo. Kinda cool way of pulling a users Instagram ego and putting it onto a piece of clothing in a not-to-obvious way. More here

2. WWF: Football Field

The best way to communicate a piece of information is to do it visually. WWF have excelled at that in this takeover of a Brazillian football pitch where, over the course of a game, they digitally hi-jacked a game featuring the national womens team. To point was to highlight that a football pitch sized piece of rainforested land is destroyed every four minutes. Watch as the pitch turns from green to brown with an explainer at the end of the game traffic to the WWF site was up 73%.

1. Ask CT Food: Instagram

An Asian food supplier called CT Food is encouraging those frequenting Asian restaurants to instagram a photo of their meal using a campaign hashtag. The brand responds with a list of ingredients and instructions how to prepare the meal and the ingredients are linked to a hashtag enabling shoppers to see what it looks like when they go to pick it up in store. It’s a really remarkable idea that latches onto an existing behaviour (taking photos of meals) to provide a real benefit to the user. The aim is to convert diners into customers of the supplier, although it may get up the nose of the Asian restaurants. It reminds me of the Hellmans mayonnaise till receipt campaign that was one of my campaigns of 2012.

@askctfood – The Asian food wizard on Instagram from CT FOOD on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. Best Marketing Campaigns January 2013
2. Best Marketing Campaigns February 2013
3. Cool List: 10 Best Marketing Campaigns May 2012

Feel free to share this around!

You can view the infographic full sized at this link: http://bit.ly/8020SMinfographic

Related posts:

1. Irish Social Media Statistics (May 2012)
2. 7 Social Media Trends For 2013
3. Facebook Statistics Ireland (May 2012)

1) Coke will more than likely feature each month
2) Ikea will appear more often than coke
3) Hidden camera stunts will feature even more often

This month there’s not one, or two, or three, or five for that matter hidden camera stunts. There’s four of the damn things. I could moan that the marketing community is bereft of good ideas but then I go and say four of the best campaigns this month are hidden camera stunts! Are we nearly all hidden camera stunt fatigued yet?

10. The Last Exorcism

As brands become more and more involved in content production what we are seeing is is old ideas taken from other media, in this case television, and them being repackaged in a brand friendly way. For example hidden camera stunts are just freaking everywhere, at this stage if I walk down a street and see anything out of the ordinary I will expect some to see some brand stunt, eventually we’ll all just become so accustomed to them they just won’t get a reaction from us (the public). Which begs the question, how many of these hidden camera stunts by brands have either gone totally awry and never seen the light of day?

9. Walking Dead Hand

In case you didn’t know I love zombies, so much so I went shooting them in a deserted shopping mall in London earlier this year. So naturally I love anything to do with The Walking Dead, except Season 2, that was a snooze fest!

8. Heineken Valentines Day

Heineken really helped out some couples without restaurant reservations on Valentines Day by offering them tables via Twitter for February 14th. Of course you could say that a brand booked up tables in restaurants and prevented real people from getting them for Valentines Day so they could run a promotion, but that would just be downright cynical of you!

7. Big Boss Brewery: Barcade

A truly awesome idea for a beer company – a streetfighter style arcade machine for two players that rewards the winner with a beer. You could say it’s a knockout marketing idea but that would be an awful line.

6. Coke: Free Money

This hidden camera stunt from Coke involved the brand giving away free money – on the condition the €100 is shared. The cynic might say this was bound to work, after all who wouldn’t like some free money, but to keep it on brand ‘sharing happiness’ the punter must share it. All those free one hundred euros add up to some pretty decent footage that you would expect to reach a wider audience than the 65K views it has so far. Uh-oh were Coke “short-changed” on this marketing effort?

5. UTEC: Billboard Turns Air into Water

When  UTEC an engineering university in Lima, Peru opened applications for it’s 2013 academic year they wanted to stand out and attract the top talent. So noting the lack of clean drinking water In Lima, the lack of rain but humidity is as high as 98% a lot of the time. The marketing agency, working with UTEC came up with a billboard that advertises the university while also turning air into drinking water.

4. Lego Brickmented Reality

Lego are a brand with many advocates, a day rarely goes by without seeing some kind of Lego-ised version of a popular culture phenomenon. So needless to say when the brand launched a UGC contest it was very popular!

3. Best Bus Stop Ever

Another hidden camera stunt, pretty good this as it did bring a smile to my face.

2. Nivea Stress Test

The fourth and final hidden camera stunt this month. The Nivea Stress Test racks up the tension on innocent bystanders who unwittingly become wanted suspects.

1. Ikea Valentines Day

Oh Ikea, how are you so brilliant?

Related posts:

1. Best Marketing Campaigns April 2013
2. Best Marketing Campaigns January 2013
3. Best Marketing Campaigns October 2012

07: Fiat Motherhood

There’s only eight ad’s this month worth talking about and this is the first. So many ad’s owe their success (or at least their concept) to Flight of the Conchords, I can’t watch any of these ads with comedy songs without hearing the influence of Bret and Jermaine somewhere in there. Ok so it’s like a brit version of Swagger Wagon but that c’mon that actually sounds like it was pulled from FOC!

06: Reserva

Content marketing is probably two words you’ve been reading loads about lately. What is it? Well it’s a buzz word for what most online marketers have been doing for some time – creating content to develop leads. So it’s been around for years, but Christ are us marketers are great at repackaging old ideas as something brand new or what? So what tangent is this we’re on? Well when it comes to content organisations often re-purpose content from one channel for another (lazy way is TV ad on Youtube/Facebook etc.). Reserva is a Brazillian clothing brand and this is the first time I have seen CCTV footage from a robbery re-purposed for an ad urging viewers to get down to their sale because ‘people are doing crazy things for Reserva’. As Reserva say in the description, it’s better than sucking lemons!

05: TNT Push The Red Button

A follow up to one of the best virals of last year. It’s no Godfather Part II, but it’s not a Part III either. This time out TNT go slightly darker with a bigger budget but it still packs in a few surprises.

04: Tokyo Shimbun

We’ve seen this before – newspaper ads that are brought to life by AR apps, but this is slightly different application. This app developed for a Tokyo newspaper turns boring articles into fun entertainment for children to interact with it. While very interesting way of to target a younger audience it’s also an extremely long term strategy.

3. Durex: SOS Condoms

This is an absolutely bonkers idea from Durex. They’ll get emergency condoms to you within an hour of you ordering it between 4pm and 4am. This was rolled out in Dubai and you can vote for where the service will be launched next – Paris is well in the lead at the time of writing, although at only 396 votes you’d expect many more by now.

2: McDonalds: Track My Maccas

McD’s in Australia came out with this timely app. I say timely because it would seem we’ve all been eating horses all along. This app tracks where your food has come from, and it doesn’t pay lip service by showing you a random farm – no! The app uses GPS to find out where you are, image recognition to see what you’re about to eat and the time to link in with McD’s food supply chain to identify where your food actually came from. AR displays the story of your food, you cam meet the people who supplied it and even play some games. Great work that makes the fast food outlet a lot more transparent.

1: Axe: Space Academy

Axe are sending 22 lucky people into space, what an incredible prize to offer consumers, you could say it was out of this world. But that would be too obvious.

Related posts:

1. Best Marketing Campaigns April 2013
2. Best Marketing Campaigns February 2013
3. 10 Best Marketing Campaigns September 2012

Speaking of lists, here’s the best marketing campaigns I found online in December 2012.

10. The Axe Pillow

As marketers we’re always finding new needs to meet so we can shift some more product. At Axe they have gone one step further with the Axe Pillow and created something that no one needs, but should entertain the desired demo.

9. Publicis Groupe: Digital Wishes

In what’s become an annual tradition Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy posts an end of year greeting. The video starts out as normal, but in a nice twist that pokes fun at the formal and boring tone of these type of videos. The video becomes interactive once you start trying to skip through it or use any of the native features on the channel.

8. Miele S8 Vacuum

Context can make advertising more relevant and in the case of outdoor advertising placement can really add a nice twist on what could be a very average ad. Throw in some speeded up footage and this works great.

7. Skittles: Telekenize The Rainbow

A bit of an odd one from Skittles, but that’s just in keeping with everything else they have done in social media in recent years!

6. Nike+: Fuel Missions Game

The Nike Fuel Missions Game gamifies everyday life in order to progress your character in an online game.

5. Fantastic Delites: Lab Mice

This isn’t a million miles away from what Coke do with their various vending machine stunts (new one below). In this a bunch of humans put on a mouse outfit and run on a treadmill to receive some free product.

4. Coke: Sing For Me

Coke + vending machine + December = This

3. Allen Solly: Twitter Billboard

This is a nice way of making a tweet turn into a real world action. This Twitter powered billboard dispenses a free item of clothing everytime a campaign hashtag was used.

2. Google Analytics IRL

When I’m trying to communicate a point about the online world I’d often compare it to an applicable offline scenario. This is the basis of a new set of virals from Google to promote Google Analytics. There’s a very familiar face in the one below.

1. Swedish Post Parcel Memory

I loved this! The mechanic isn’t anything new, it’s been used on TV and in games for a long time. You have to find two of the same items in order to win that item. However the large scale execution is what brings it into new territory.

Related posts:

1. Cool List: 10 Best Marketing Campaigns May 2012
2. Best Marketing Campaigns Summer 2012
3. Best Marketing Campaigns October 2012