Standing out in the advertising world is becoming increasingly difficult, be it online or offline. Clients are supplying ad agencies with millions to promote their brand in the best way possible over their well-established competitors. Every brand wants their videos to go viral, especially in the highly competitive sports industry. Budgets on ads are amongst the highest, with top stars often drafted in too. One of the most noticeable campaigns came in 2013 when BT began their £100m ‘ad blitz’ to promote BT Sport. All football fans have heard they will now be covering Champions League games instead of Sky Sports. BT partnered up with BBDO (Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) for the campaign and attracted football stars from around the world to star in the ad for example Gareth Bale, Frank Ribery and David Luiz are seen playing FIFA and partying in a mansion to the soundtrack of Lethal Bizzle, a collaboration which has helped the campaign gain extra traction with Lethal Bizzle’s fans on social media. To date our favourite sport advert has come through the partnership between TBWA and Adidas; ‘Jump with D Rose’ a campaign to turn Derrick Rose into an urban icon for kids in London. The advert is not just about Adidas or Derrick Rose, it is about the talented kids from London. This campaign didn’t have a media budget, a video was posted online which gained over 4 million views in 10 hours, a refreshing change in sports media advertising. We also recently spoke with Gabriela Lungu who has recently become Creative Director at TBWA and she mentioned her favourite ad to come out of TBWA was with Apple and their “Think Different” campaign. We will let you decide. Gabriela also mentioned the campaign Grey London created with Volvo. The Life Paint campaign was created to promote a product to make cyclist more visible at night, an eye opening video for drivers that the roads are for cyclists too. Again this ad saw a nice blend with online and offline promotion, the video had real life experiences, posters were put up around London and spray cans were given away in cycle shops.
Moving into other areas, other eye-catching campaigns that have impressed recently are the partnership between EE and Poke London, a campaign to promote the mobile phone service provider, using popular YouTube personalities. No doubt these videos will quickly reach a million views on YouTube. We don’t even really need to mention Paddy Power in this blog. Everything they do gets noticed even if it isn’t totally accepted by the public. Speaking of things not going unnoticed, the ‘Beach Body Ready’ campaign picked up a lot of publicity for all the wrong reasons. No matter where you stand on the campaign, it certainly won’t have gone under your radar.
Finally, another of our favourites at the moment will undo all sporting endeavours; if you haven’t done so already check out McDonald’s latest Emoji campaign in France. Working with BETC Paris Mc Donald’s have put together another viral campaign that sees us going about our daily routine driving around with friends, at the barbers, dancing, but instead of human heads, they all have giant, 3-D, cartoon faces. Traditional media practices have also been mixed with the powers of social media, people have taken to twitter to tweet about the Mc Donald’s Emoji Posters around the world that tell a story and usually end with the ‘Emoji’ leaving Mc Donald’s happy. Engagment, Tick. Conversion, Tick.
What are your favourite recent ad campaigns? Tweet us @digireccomp, let us know.