Category: Marketing Strategies

The Beer Turnstile

Consumption of alcoholic drinks skyrockets during the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. During this period there is also an increase in traffic accidents. 50% of these accidents are caused by drunk drivers.

Antarctica Beer being the official sponsor of the carnival decided to make the event safe by ensuring everyone used public transport to get home safely. So with AlmapBBDO they created a beer turnstile that was installed at a subway station where all the carnival groups gathered. On successfully scanning an empty Antarctica beer can at the turnstile, people were allowed to travel for free.

As a result the turnstile was used by 1000 people per hour, thats 86% higher than the conventional turnstiles on the same day. The number of drunk drivers caught on that day also dropped by 43%.

Temptation Telephone

‘Ring ring….’ would you be tempted to answer a ringing pink telephone? Benefit Cosmetics placed a pink phone booth bang in the middle of London for a day. Then the people who dared to answer the pink phone were made to sing the Whitney Houston classic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” in front of a packed house while being accompanied by a live band at London’s most iconic venues, Café de Paris.

Where will the temptation telephone ring next and will you be brave enough to answer? 😉

Sveriges Radio Plus

Right now, most second screen experiences push content to the user but do very little by way of two-way interactivity. That however is slowly changing and can already be seen in the TV based second screen experiences from Heineken and Chevy.

Now in one of the first examples of second screen experiences that I have seen with radio, Swedish ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors has attempted to make the whole radio experience more visual, interactive, and shareable.

With a new radio player called “Swedish Radio Plus” they allowed people on computers and mobile devices to listen in on the radio programs and simultaneously add videos, pictures, comments, maps and polls to the radio timeline. All post made on this custom timeline were also shared on the users Facebook profile, with a link to that exact part of the program.

To give it a try yourself visit the demo page here.

Air Check-in

Now there is an app that lets parachutists “check in” on Facebook as they free fall through the sky. 😎

Parachuting specialists Sky Company, wanted to promote their Facebook fan page. So with ageisobar Brazil they developed the Air Check-in app [iTunes Link] that allowed users to take pictures during their jump while recording their height. Then based on their 3G reception at the altitude post the details on the users Facebook timeline or store the check-in for later.

The check-in posts made by the app had a link to Sky Company’s Facebook fan page. So this not only helped boost their fan count on Facebook, but also helped increase the number of jumps with their team by 26%.

The above app also brought back memories of another parachuting campaign that was done by hotels.com in September 2011. This time the campaign was centered around the company’s high-speed mobile booking application, which allowed users to book rooms at its network of almost 140,000 hotels worldwide.

To promote their smart phone app they teamed up with extreme athlete and stuntman, JT Holmes, for a wild and exciting digital demonstration to prove just how easy it was to book a room while “on the fly”. 🙂

Smart Apps

Here are two mobile apps that recently caught my eye…

Audi Start-Stop App

The Audi start-stop system turns off the engine when the car stops at a traffic light and turns it on again when the car starts. Using the same principle Audi along with DDB Spain created an Android app that detects which applications have been open longest without being used and sends an alert to the user to close them. Thus saving battery and making the phone a more efficient tool.

Reborn Apps

Many events create their own smartphone apps. But when the event is over, the apps lose their usefulness and are then hardly used. To give these apps a second life, Duval Guillaume got various Belgium organisations to push out an update which turned their event apps into a registration medium for organ donation.

The Brightest Online Ad

Publicis Germany to promote Lupine’s bike lighting system created a unique promotion with BIKE Online Magazine.

Subscribers of BIKE could only read their magazine if they turned on the Lupine Bike Lamp. This tweak to the magazine gave 100% attention to Lupine. Readers who shared the idea in their social networks automatically distributed a link to a sneak preview of the magazine where the Lupine Lamp illuminated only a small part of the magazine. To read the whole magazine users were asked to order a trial subscription.

Click here to watch the video on the AdsSpot website.

One Copy Song

Adam Tensta, a hip hop artist from Sweden remembers back in the day when one had to wait for a song to release, and then stand in line to get the new single fresh hot off the presses. So for his new single “Pass It On” he along with R/GA New York decided to bring some of that exclusivity back with a Facebook app that allowed only one person to listen to the track at a time, before it was passed to someone else.

To spread the song by word of mouth they played on peoples need to get first in line. Registered users were asked to watch, listen or tweet in order to pass 15 people in the line.

Axa Crazy Driver

To raise people’s awareness and make them realize that nobody wants to pay for bad drivers. Axa decided to play a trick on people with the help of a little old lady.

On an ordinary market day in a small, tranquil French town, an old lady was seen getting out of her parking space. In the process she knocked almost everything in her way before crashing into a line of market stalls. With the reveal being…

Chevy’s guide to hacking the Super Bowl

Super Bowl is the biggest TV advertising day in USA. With over 50 advertisers competing for viewers attention, it is really difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd.

With smartphones and tablets in people’s hands, Chevy devised a new way to own the day. With “Chevy Game Time” they gave viewers a live second screen experience, that successfully distracted them from their competitors ads while making them watch the Chevy ads again and again on multiple screens. 😎

On game day 700,000 app users interacted in real time with the Chevy ads. All for a chance to win a Chevy. Each time one of the ads aired, viewers were encoraged to answer trivia questions about the ad. This got entire Super Bowl parties to watch the ads very closely, multiple times i.e. first on TV, then in the app, then on YouTube.

In a unique integration between app and live broadcast TV, every app user was given a personal license plate; and if they spotted their plate in the ads, the car was theirs. 🙂

As a result, Chevy ranked #1 in the Super Bowl buzz and their “Game Time” app became USA’s featured app on both Android and Apple app stores.

The Urban Twitter

TBWA was the last agency to move to Lisbon’s advertising district. With their top competitors already there, they decided to showcase their creativity by turning 19 windows of their office into a 36m long twitter billboard.

The video below does not explain how exactly the people were encouraged to send in their tweets, but it does show that people tweeted about politics, taxes, Europe, Merkel’s visit etc. In the end all the window tweeting created quite a stir in the local media.