Category: Marketing Strategies

The Great Art Heist

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But if Volkswagen Canada has their say, beauty will be in the hands of the person who’s stealing it. At least that’s the idea behind their latest ambient meets social campaign for the new Volkswagen Jetta GLI.

Since the beginning of October, agency Red Urban has created a series of pop-up art galleries across major cities in Canada, that feature “Light Paintings” made by the movement of the Volkswagen Jetta.

While the frames in the exhibits have been hung for all to admire, they haven’t really been hung that securely, allowing more daring admirers to claim the artwork for themselves. The thieves were also being asked to share their stolen items via Tweets and Facebook posts. Volkswagen Canada’s Facebook page has already started receiving photos from fans decorating homes and offices with the eye-catching imagery…

Sukiennice “Secrets Behind Paintings”

The Sukiennice Museum in Krakow is one of the oldest museums in Poland and it was being re-opened after a complete renovation. The problem however was that the young people did not find the 19th century Polish art interesting. Leo Burnett Warsaw was given the challenge to attract this young audience to the museum. So they designed a campaign to engage the young audience with the “New Sukiennice” augmented reality app. This museum app brought the paintings to life and showed their stories via short films.

The app played a central role in the integrated campaign that included billboards, social media and e-cards. The buzz generated by the campaign attracted 20% of Krakow’s population to the museum!

Ikea Manland

Last month Ikea in Sydney, Australia ran a four-day trial of Manland. They created a dedicated area in the store which men with short retail attention spans could use to escape the pains of weekend shopping at Ikea. In simple words it was a day-care for husbands and boyfriends who wanted to take a break from the shopping. The store offered free hot dogs, Xbox consoles, pinball machines and nonstop sports action on TV. Ikea even gave a buzzer to remind girls to stop buy to pick-up their men!

As a result Manland got tons of international press coverage…

Augmented Reality – Hyperlinking the real world

Is the end near for the QR code? It has been put to good use in countless innovative projects, but recently I am starting to see a drift towards technology that can produce similar results without the codes.

French company Capturio, lets users turn their t-shirts into a business card! Now Blippar in UK is creating augmented reality effects from printed images without any activation from a QR code. All the users needs to do is:

  1. download a custom app…in this case its from Blippar
  2. scan a Blippar enabled printed image (identifiable by a small Blippar logo) with their iPhone, iPad or Android device
  3. and begin interaction with the augmented reality 3D overlay seen on the screen…

In India I have seen Telibrahma using the same technology to increase the experiential engagements of brands via traditional mediums i.e. newspapers, posters etc.

The TimeKiller App

For the last two years in a row, SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) has won the award for being Europe’s most punctual airline. With their ad agency SWE Advertising Stockholm, they created a great little time wasting utility app that isn’t actually made for its loyal customers, but for their competitor airline customers. 😎

The idea was to poke a little fun at SAS’ competitor airlines by suggesting to their customers that they’ll need this app from SAS because chances are, their flight will be delayed and they will need something to kill their time with…

Subway “Daredevil Delivery”

Subway was facing massive competition from other fast food chains in China. Mobile agency iconmobile was given the task to claim the mindsets of their target audience in an innovative way that also triggered sales.

A mobile game was created to let users step into the role of a subway delivery guy. Rather than just providing an emotional benefit, the app also included…

  • a map that provided direction to shops nearby
  • a click-2-call order function
  • a mobile coupon channel to trigger sales according to the users behaviour

The Airwalk Invisible Pop Up Store

GoldRun and Young & Rubicam have created the world’s first invisible pop-up store, bringing limited edition Airwalk sneakers directly to the biggest skate & surf spots in the country. Sneakerheads and skaters alike visited the virtual store at Washington Square Park in NYC and Venice Beach in LA.

SNS Bank “I Want Interest On My Current Account”

SNS Bank is the first big dutch bank to start offering their customers interest on their normal bank accounts. To promote this new offering, ad agency Bone from The Netherlands created an unique protest.

Everybody could sign up for the protest via their Facebook or Twitter accounts. After which their profile pictures were connected to various live rich media banners that were being run on sites like msn.nl and telegraaf.nl.

Power is football

Wunderman Buenos Aires is back with another twitter campaign. This time they have leveraged twitter to create a live infographic for every game played in the Copa America Argentina 2011, the most important football championship in South America.

The official microsite aggregated every tweet about every game, and compiled them into an interactive infographic style interface where one could explore the social interaction through every minute of the match!

Carlsberg “Bikers in Cinema”

Carlsberg beer stands for tradition, quality, great taste…and making the right choices. To reinforce this in the minds of the people in Belgium, ad agency Duval Guillaume Modem proposed an experiment.

In Kinepolis a Belgian cinema, some innocent couples were made to sit amongst a theatre full of not so friendly bikers. Their reactions were recorded and made into the below viral video…