Gone are the days of advertising in newspapers and magazines. Businesses have now moved their campaigns to the online world, and why wouldn’t they? Digital marketing agency ad campaigns increase brand awareness, build sales, and create customer loyalty in a way that print advertising can’t match.
While digital marketing can provide your company with several benefits, figuring out the best way to execute a campaign isn’t easy. Let’s look at some examples of great digital marketing ad campaigns, which digital agencies worked on them, and discuss what makes them work.
Tide’s Every Ad Is A Tide Ad Campaign – Saatchi & Saatchi New York
Everyone wants ad space at the Superbowl, but at $5,000,000 for thirty seconds, only a few companies can afford it.
What’s better than one ad at the Superbowl? Claiming every ad as your own. This ad spot, starring Stranger Thing’s David Harbour, uses the cleanliness of other ads as it’s selling point. The video features Harbour in various situations you see in other stereotypical television ads. Throughout the spot, he points out a trend: everyone’s clothes are spotless because the people in the ads use Tide.
If everyone in other ads uses Tide, every ad you see during the Superbowl is a Tide commercial. The genius of this ad is that from then on, anyone watching the game on television focused on the clothing of people in other ads and realized that Tide was right. In essence, by buying a one-minute spot, Tide turned the tables on every other company by turning their commercials into Tide ads.
The social media reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone began pointing out the truth of the ad and poking fun at the clean clothes of mechanics and other people. #EveryAdIsATideAd started trending and for the next week, Tide owned social media and dominated the most important marketing event of the year.
Lessons For Your Business
Tide spent a lot of money on this campaign, but it paid off for them in a big way.
This campaign showed businesses that you don’t have to match your competitors dollar for dollar. Instead, you can add value to your campaign by thinking outside of the box. Tide didn’t settle for thinking of a funny or provocative ad like every other Superbowl commercial. Instead, they decided to hijack every other ad by highlighting what their company does best. They created an ad based on making fun of the advertising industry and then used social media to spread their message to their target audience.
The power of social media lies in its global outreach. Most Superbowl ads focus on the male 18-49 demographic, which this ad did as well. By creating an ad that they knew would go viral, however, Tide reached millions of households and organically made their way to their target customer.
In this campaign, social media embraced Tide because the company didn’t take itself to seriously. It was fun, engaging, and absurd in all the right ways. It gave the viewer a glimpse into the staged world of advertising and then positioned Tide as the company that makes other ads possible.
State Street Global Advisors’ Fearless Girl Campaign – McCann New York
Few advertising campaigns make global headlines and become a rallying cry for a generation, but State Street Global Advisors’ Fearless Girl campaign did both. On International Woman’s Day, a bronze statue mysteriously appeared on Wall Street in New York City. The statue depicts a young girl staring fear down the Wall Street bull.
Due to the discussion of a lack of female representation in the corporate world, along with studies that show that women make 3/4ths of what men make, the campaign aimed to showcase the need for diversity on corporate boards. After the statue appeared, State Street sent a letter to thousands of companies to request that they increase boardroom diversity.
Using #SheMakesADifference, the campaign reached 745 million Instagram impressions 12 hours after the statue appeared. In only 12 weeks, the campaign reached 4.6 billion Twitter impressions.
Their campaign brought together social issues, social media, and the needs of their core customers into one marketing strategy. They delivered their message in a heartfelt and genuine way.
Lessons For Your Business
Never underestimate the power of social media. A majority of Americans now use social media, with the bulk of the traffic going to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Social media also drives buying decisions, especially among Millenials, who are now the dominant group in the workforce. Creating digital marketing agency ad campaigns that become viral on these websites and that are share-worthy does more than giving your website traffic and your company shares. You’ll humanize your business.
State Street humanized its business by picking the right spot at the right time. They created a powerful visual and let social media work its magic without grandstanding. Part of what made this campaign so successful was the fact that the company stayed out of the way. They let the message speak for itself.
When delving into social issues, you need to do two things: be careful and genuine. Here, State Street chose an issue that they were passionate about and that transcends politics. Their message is one of hope, courage, and inclusiveness.
Heathrow Airport’s The Heathrow Bears Return Campaign – Havas
With the holidays around the corner, it’s only fitting that we should include a Christmas campaign on our list. Over the past several years, holiday commercials have lacked a certain spirit. Lately, it seems like companies have worried more about leading with their product and leaving the holiday cheer at the door. Luckily, Heathrow Airport always comes through with a reminder of what the holidays are all about: family.
This ad is a continuation in the story of the Heathrow bears. In the third edition, the bears find themselves in Florida trying to celebrate Florida, but things aren’t right. After visiting with their family online, they decide to fly into Heathrow to see their family in London.
The ad itself started as a television spot, but Heathrow has taken it a step further by dedicating an entire section of its website to the Heathrow bears. You can see their family trees, watch the ads, and take a quiz to see which bear you are. You can post the results on social media, expanding the campaigns reach and making it an international
This campaign does a lot of things well. First, it positions Heathrow as the airport of the holidays. Anyone with family in the United Kingdom probably has a memory of flying into Heathrow and being welcomed by their famous Christmas trees. Heathrow does an excellent job of evoking those memories without forcing them onto the viewer.
Heathrow also stayed on-brand by emphasizing their message of flying to people, not to places. Heathrow wants flyers to view their families and friends as their destination, not the airport. This ad campaign as a whole does an excellent job of pushing that message.
Lessons For Your Business
This campaign provides some powerful lessons for companies that want to run digital campaigns. First, your business needs to ask a simple but powerful question: what is our message? While it’s a simple question, the answer might surprise you.
Most businesses know what they sell and have an idea of who their target customers are, but it’s harder to pinpoint a message. In Heathrow’s case, the message is that they are there to help you reach your destination, not be the destination themselves. Instead of taking the popular route of smashing their customer’s over the head with it, Heathrow’s approach is to subtly allow the viewer of the ad to discover it themselves.
When you run a campaign, you need to know your message and trust that your customers will understand it. Build around your message, never let up on it, but also, don’t beat your customers over the head with it. Let them discover it organically.
Skittles’ Exclusive The Rainbow – DDB Chicago
We’ve mentioned that companies should work to find their ideal customer before, but Skittles took that idea to a new extreme. Instead of spending five million dollars for a Superbowl ad for millions, they created their ad for one person named Marcos Menendez, a real-life Skittles lover from Canoga Park, California.
This campaign uses two psychological tricks. First, it takes advantage of the idea that what you can’t see is better than what you can. Your imagination will fill in fantastical details with a slight nudge.
Second, it takes advantage of the human desire to experience something exclusive, which is a marketing tactic that DDB Chicago executes in several campaigns, making the hiring of this agency a smart move by Skittles.
Apple understands this principle better than most companies. Sure, they make quality phones, but they work hard to sell consumers the idea of being a part of something exclusive, almost to the point of turning their product into a counter-culture.
Skittles created an ad for one person but turned that into an ad for everyone by showing Menendez’s reactions. The viewer lived vicariously through Menendez and felt like they were sitting in on something exclusive.
It was a unique campaign by Skittles that effectively made their product the candy of choice for those that wanted something different than the run of the mill chocolate bar. It also showed the company’s commitment to its fans and put the thought into the viewers’ minds that their customer base was part of an elite club.
Lessons For Your Business
Skittles achieved two things that, if you can execute them properly, will help make sure that your campaigns are a success. First, give your products a feeling of exclusivity. If you aren’t a major player in your niche yet, set your product up as an alternative to the more popular choices. You see this happen in marketing all the time:
These strategies allow you to turn a weakness (lower market share) into a positive (exclusiveness). Of course, if you use this strategy, you’ll find yourself where Apple is now. How do you sell people on exclusiveness when you become the leader?
Skittles also used the viewer’s imagination to sell their products. Much like Heathrow in the previous example, your company should trust their audience to find the desired message without having to beat them over the head with it. Times have changed. In the ’80s and ’90s, advertisers were told to drive their message home without making the viewers have to dig it out.
Consumers no longer want to feel spoon-fed. Trust your audience and customers and they will reward you. The metrics behind the success of Skittle’s ad campaign show that this strategy works. Skittles saw a 7% rise in sales in the weeks following this campaign and earned five billion impressions on social media.
How The Magic of These Digital Marketing Agency Ad Campaigns Can Be Captured?
Creating digital marketing agency ad campaigns requires a lot of thought, creativity, and an understanding of what customers want.
You need both information and impeccable timing if you want your campaign to catch on with a global audience. You also need to keep your finger on the pulse of current trends in the advertising world.
DAN can help you with that. We’re putting together a community of the best marketing companies in the world to share information.
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