Do you like to learn by studying examples of others work? We certainly do. So in this series of great marketing classic campaigns and examples, we will do just that.
Why are these marketing campaigns some of the classics of all time?
Because of the impact, they had on the growth of the brand, and because they manage to hit on some universal truth.
This truth allows us to remember these campaigns years after they first began. In fact, some of us might not have even been alive when these campaigns first aired!
But first … what is a marketing campaign?
A marketing campaign is an ad or group of ads centralized around one message. They often use many different marketing channels to get this idea across.
The timing of these campaigns is also very clearly defined.
So here they are, in no particular order (but feel free to let us know which one is your favorite in the comments) – many of the most popular campaigns of all time, and the lessons we can learn from them.
Classic campaigns … KLM – Royal Dutch Airlines
When choosing to learn from others’ social media marketing campaign strategies, it is always helpful to choose the best of the best.
Those that are most innovative and very eager to try lots new and different ideas. And not afraid of a failure or two.
KLM Airlines marketing certainly deserves to be this camp. Real social media marketing innovators. They frequently come up when marketers are discussing the best in social media marketing.
Over the past seven years, they have launched a number of social campaigns – some big, some small. They had a few failures along with great successes.
Let’s examine some of their more noteworthy campaigns.
Remember how great it felt the first time you got a social response from a brand you love or business you deal with?
All the good will generated by their speedy response?
Well, KLM decided to run an experiment with its social community, for people who check in via foursquare for flights or tweet about waiting to board the next KLM service, and they called it “KLM Surprise”.
The aim of this campaign was to bring random surprises and happiness to the boring wait for flights.
KLM’s social campaign involved a team of people identifying KLM passengers currently waiting for flights (and hanging out on twitter), before researching each person’s social profile to find out a little more about their personality and destination.
Given that information, they matched passengers to a surprise gift that they’d give before each person boarded their flight.
The aim was to add a little surprise to create happy customers who have plenty of time on their hands to tweet their network about a great KLM experience at the airport.
In another act of social media genius, KLM used Twitter to add a flight to its roster.
It all started when a Dutch filmmaker tweeted his disappointment about the lack of a direct flight from Amsterdam to Miami.
Specifically, he was looking for a hangover-reducing direct flight to/from the Ultra Music Festival taking place in Miami on March 21st, 2011.
A KLM rep rapidly responded with a wager – if the filmmaker could book an entire flight (351 seats) before December 6th, KLM would add the non-stop flight to its schedule.
Beyond all expectations, the resulting campaign Fly2Miami sold out the entire flight within 5 hours.
I’ll say it again. Talk about GREAT ability to listening to customers, yes?
Tile and inspire
The KLM Tile and Inspire campaign sought to engage customers by soliciting tile image designs from them. The winning designs would be put on one KLM aircraft.
The Boeing 777 with over 4,000 Delft blue images from Facebook fans is still flying around the globe!
Let’s see … 4000 winners telling 20 of their closest friends about the experience, and then they each tell ten more friends.
That is a great way to spread your message, isn’t it?
Here is a great little KLM video on this campaign:
This is truly a masterpiece from the Dove cosmetic brand. People tend to be very harsh on themselves.
When describing ourselves, we often deprecate our physical appearance and send out a message of it being worse than it is.
What Dove decided to prove with Real Beauty Sketches campaign is that every woman is beautiful in her ways.
The film, created by Ogilvy & Mather Brazil, features an FBI-trained sketch artist drawing a woman’s portrait according to her self-description.
He then sketches a portrait of the same woman according to a stranger’s description of her.
Throughout, the artist never lays eyes on the women themselves, and neither the artist nor women know about the social experiment.
The images that were drawn were completely different, and Dove accompanied this finding with a compelling statistic that only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.
The goals of the campaign were to build brand love and loyalty as well as turn beauty into a source of confidence, not anxiety.
As it turned out, women were critical to themselves and the ways they described themselves were quite different from how they appeared to others’.
Real Beauty Sketches became a huge success.
The video became the most watched online ad ever and amassed over 150 million views across different video platforms.
Imagine a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety.
That’s the tagline for Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, which has been turning heads since its launch in 2004.
It’s a simple but effective approach to persona marketing: They created ads around a topic they knew was sensitive but meaningful to their customers.
They promoted the idea that everyone is beautiful in their way.
They pointed out how the idea of beauty is distorted by the skinny models that appear on the cover pages of a fashion magazine or walk down the ramp in a fashion show.
Nike: Just Do It
Did you know that once upon a time, Nike’s product catered almost exclusively to marathon runners?
Then, a fitness craze emerged — and the folks in Nike’s marketing department knew they needed to take advantage of it to surpass their main competitor, Reebok. (At the time, Reebok was selling more shoes than Nike).
And so, in the late 1980s, Nike created the “Just Do It.” campaign.
It was a huge hit.
In 1988, Nike sales were at $800 million; by 1998, sales exceeded $9.2 billion. “Just Do It.” was short and sweet, yet encapsulated everything people felt when they were exercising — and people still feel that feeling today.
Don’t want to run five miles? Just Do It.
Don’t want to walk up four flights of stairs? Just Do It. It’s a slogan we can all relate to the drive to push ourselves beyond our limits.
So when you’re trying to decide the best way to present your brand, ask yourself what problem are you solving for your customers.
What solution does your product or service provide? By hitting on that core issue in all of your marketing messaging, you’ll connect with consumers on an emotional level that is hard to ignore.
The Apple board first rejected this 60-second advertisement, but Steve Jobs chose to go ahead and unveil it during the third quarter break of the Super Bowl XVIII.
This ad made by the agency Chiat\Day was something out of the ordinary, untested and it sent out a message that Apple is not scared of the then-existing computer giants (read IBM).
This went on to be voted as the best commercial ever made.
While there have been many great Apple campaigns, this one takes the cake.
The Mac vs. PC debate ended up being one of the most successful campaigns ever for Apple, and they experienced 42% market share growth in its first year.
The campaign tells Mac’s audience everything they need to know about their product without being overt — and they did it cleverly.
A key takeaway here?
Just because your product does some pretty amazing things doesn’t mean you need to hit your audience over the head with it. Instead, explain your product’s benefits in a relatable way, so consumers can see themselves using it.
Get A Mac—Perceptive Marketing
Apple nailed it with their successful four-year television campaign, Get A Mac, which showcased a Mac vs. PC theme.
The indirect brilliance of this campaign is that it took advantage of people’s perceptions and ignorance at the same time while shielding Apple from litigation liabilities.
Because of public perception, the average person viewing Apple’s Mac vs. PC advertisements subconsciously interpreted the marketing campaign into Mac vs. Windows.
Apple never attacked Microsoft or Windows by name directly; they only allowed consumers to perceive that thought because most people don’t realize Apple computers are PC’s too—at the risk of being politically correct, PC stands for “personal computer,” not Windows operating the software.
In fact, even Wikipedia today has it wrong on their website.
According to Adweek in 2010, “Get a Mac” was the “best advertising campaign of the first decade of the new century.”
Apparently, Microsoft thought so too, so they launched a $300 million advertising campaign with the tagline “I’m a PC, and Windows 7 was my idea”.
Clairol: Does She or Doesn’t She?
The first time Clairol asked this question in 1957, the answer was 1 to 15 — as in, only 1 in 15 people were using artificial hair color.
Just 11 years later, the answer was 1 of 2, according to TIME Magazine.
The campaign was apparently so successful that some states stopped requiring women to denote hair color on their driver’s license.
When your ad campaign starts changing things at the DMV, you know you’ve hit a nerve.
Clairol did the opposite of what most marketers would do:
They didn’t want every woman on the street running around saying they were using their product.
They wanted women to understand that their product was so good that people wouldn’t be able to tell if they were using it or not.
The lesson here: Sometimes, simply conveying how and why your product works are enough for consumers.
To be effective in this new era, we as marketers need to see our jobs differently.
No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares.
We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire brand experiences that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.
We can do better. Much better.
But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your advertising design?
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of the small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Could you guess the most successful advertisements ever? You might ask about the criteria for most popular, yes? In this case, I will use the most awarded ads, according to the Gunn Report.
Many successful advertisements.
Does your business use emotional appeal to win the hearts of your customers? Have you ever given it a try?
Like David Freemantle says, feelings have a critical role in this regard. Few of any ads will make an emotional appeal.
They will try to amuse and dazzle more than touch the heart. Which factor do you feel is most effective in drawing attention to your advertisements? There are many to choose from, aren’t they?
This is a critical missed opportunity in our view. We have studied and evaluated commercials for more than five years.
Our focus is somewhat unique; we aren’t interested in entertainment value, we are interested in business impact.
We study each spot and evaluate its power to build the business and to build the brand.
Related: 12 Best Examples of Successful Advertisement Elements
While emotional spots are not common, they are some of the most effective we have seen. Consider this emotion:
In the advertising business, everyone is familiar with a commercial for the French TV company Canal+, titled “The Bear.” Created by ad agency BETC Paris, this commercial is now, officially, the best TV ad of all time, according to The Gunn Report, which tracks advertising awards.
Released in 2011, it has been viewed 1 million times on YouTube but has never aired in any of the larger TV markets in the English-speaking West because it’s for a French brand.
For Canal+, its communications are driven by a desire to remind audiences of its commitment to quality cinema.
As part of this strategy the channel’s ad agency, BETC Paris, produced an offbeat, witty TV commercial – ‘The Bear’ – in which a bearskin rug explains what it takes to become a great Hollywood director.
Have you seen this advertisement? If you have not seen this 30-second ad, you can check it out here.
Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering. This advertisement certainly achieves this goal, don’t you think?
Let’s examine this commercial and what contributes to the secrets of successful advertisements. And its ability to influence or persuade:
Successful advertisements … define a value proposition
The value that truly discriminates you from your competition. Give your customers reasons to select you.
Successful advertisements … make your messages simple
So simple that the reader will quickly understand. Keep in mind that pictures are far more valuable than words.
Advertising campaign example.
Successful advertisements … define your positioning
Your positioning is your frame of reference. Make comparisons to your competitors if you can.
Link your messages
Link your messages to your brand. Remember the AFLAC duck or E-Trade’s talking baby … these are great linkages to the brands.
Successful advertisements … make your ad a component
It should be a component of an integrated marketing campaign.
Be relevant to the target market
Keep in mind that one message does not fit all. It starts with knowing your target market. Here the target market is families who like to watch cinema.
This commercial is certainly relevant to this market, isn’t it?
Grab and hold the attention
Hold attention with interesting information. Keep in mind that people don’t read ads, they read what interests them. Your ad messages must be interesting to your target communities.
Your ad messages must be interesting to your target communities. This message certainly grabs and holds attention based on the simple emotion of effective humor.
Define a value proposition
A unique selling propositionthat truly discriminates you from your competition. Give your customers reasons to select you.
Maybe not the most significant visible feature, it does illustrate Canal+’s claim as a company that puts a high priority on great cinema, which is their clear, yet very simple message: ‘The more you watch Canal+, the more you love cinema.’
Tell a fun story
This is a humorous story that draws in potential customers. It stars a bearskin rug who, having seen a lot of movies on TV from his spot on the living room floor, becomes a movie director himself in the egotistic style of Stanley Kubrick.
Through a combination of live action and CG ‘The Bear’, shows the rug at work as a film director behind the scenes of his latest film, complete with mood swings and tantrums.
The narrative wittily and succinctly brings to life Canal+’s claim that: ‘The more you watch Canal+, the more you love cinema.’
Make messages simple
Simple enough that the reader will quickly understand. Keep in mind that pictures are far more valuable than words.
Creating customer emotion though solid humor does not get any simpler than this, does it?
Customers and particularly the target customers are looking for new winning cinema features. No reason to buy without these and the marketing strategy certainly is addressing this end state in our opinion.
The commercial does not address any specific examples of Canal+ cinema examples or features or why Canal+ is the best. A weakness we believe.
There are no better means of influence or persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion. This commercial focuses on emotional appeal grandly, with its witty humor.
A real pleasure to watch in our minds.
It is the secret of this commercial’s success.
Outstanding visuals
This video would have been a winner without the commitment of the outstanding visuals. The bear rug visuals pushed it well over the top, didn’t they?
Remember, it is not what advertising does with the consumer; it is what the consumer does after viewing the advertisement.
After looking over these enablers, we believe Canal+ has created a very effective commercial, well worthy of its awards and popularity.
What do you think? Does this commercial persuade you? It certainly persuades me.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Ever wanted to build the best marketing campaigns, or thought about it? We’ve done marketing for our clients in small businesses for the past 5+ years and learned a few things about making creative marketing campaigns and advertising look professional even on a tight budget.
And the true measure of successful marketing campaign design? That is having customers remember and talk about them.
Ten years ago, social media was in its infancy. Nobody even heard of mobile marketing, content marketing or big data. The iPhone hadn’t even been launched yet. If you took a reasonably competent marketer from 2007 and transported her to today, much of what she knew about her job would be irrelevant.
We’re at a similar point now. Many of the most powerful technologies that will shape marketing over the next ten years are just emerging and many marketers will be left behind. Clearly, anybody who thinks that they can get by doing more of what they’re doing today is kidding themselves.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to exactly predict the future, but we can look at today’s technology and make some basic judgments. Big data and artificial intelligence will become much more powerful and interact more completely with the physical world. That, in turn, will transform how we identify and serve customers to something very different from today.
We like what Seth thinks about this.
We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage.
-Seth Godin
Many small businesses don’t have a lot of time or resources to have their marketing campaigns or ads professionally designed. Marketing or advertising, you need to create information that your customers find interesting and worth talking about and remembering. Customers read and remember things that interest them.
So what’s a small business to do?
Here are eight important marketing design elements we rely on to design creative marketing campaigns and the best examples of each that we could find. Great way to learn and stimulate marketing campaign design ideas:
Best marketing campaigns … consumer insights
Consumer insight is a simple truth that applies to a significant set of your target community. Businesses must understand what customers are and aren’t buying and why. They should also understand the way and why customers behave the way they do.
Here are two examples of customer insights that we like a lot:
The first example is Sam Walton who put large stores in sparsely populated locations – the opposite of retail orthodoxy – because he ‘understood’ that the vastly improved highway system had made it easy for shoppers from the larger urban areas to travel to these stores and for the suppliers to deliver goods cheaply.
Another example is Steve Jobs insisting that the iMac was launched with four colors because he got that color is a way that people express themselves and makes the computer personal. This did not go down well with the left-brained people who could say the negatives: delayed launch, higher inventory, more pressure in forecasting, etc.
Specific, attainable objectives
The objective of creative marketing campaigns is to position your business as a better but less expensive alternative to your best competitors. You should specify what your customer community should think, feel, and do.
Focus on using emotions as much as possible. You’ll be surprised at the results.
Create the customer persona to represent your target community (think community and not an audience. Why you may ask? A community is about multi-way way engagement in the group, while an audience signifies one-way transmission.)
Listen to these personas, collect quotes and comments, as well as testimonials.
Successful marketing campaign examples … target each campaign
Creative marketing campaigns address issues that are specific to given objectives. So one campaign strategy won’t be effective for all of your objectives obviously.
Design marketing campaigns to specific business objectives. Think about your objectives, ok?
Think strategically, not predictably
You want to think strategically and avoid predictability. Think branding, the positioning of your messages, and direct responses.
Branding – Your branding is all about showing consistent messages and personality all the time. This is not about us, but how people perceive us and our story, what we look like, and what value we offer others.
Positioning – Positioning is about finding a niche in customers’ minds, and filling it with a tag line and unique selling position (USP) that will capture their attention and be remembered. A USP is one of the fundamental pieces of any solid marketing campaign. Simply stated, it’s a summary of what makes your business unique and valuable to your target market. It answers the question: How do your business services benefit your clients better than anyone else can?
This is because a USP can give a great deal of clarity to your business model, what your company does and why you do it. It can define your business and most important business goals in just a sentence.
Direct response – A direct response is a trigger you want from customers that result in an action you are seeking. The final result will hopefully yield new business for your company.
Good stories immediately focus on engagement, experiences, and emotion … central tenets that are attractive to most customers. The narrative makes your message relevant and memorable through personalization.
Stories are a great means for sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.
Here is an example. It is one of my favorite examples of a company going viral and creating a story worth talking about. The company is WePay, and their story is a stunt of leaving a 600-pound block of ice in front of a PayPal conference.
Have you heard of them?
WePay’s execution here was brilliant: for years, people had been complaining about how PayPal would “freeze” their accounts, locking them out from withdrawing the money they earned. If you sell goods online, your PayPal account could be a big part of your livelihood, so to be locked out and ignored was obviously enraging for many people.
No surprise, then, that WePay’s jab at PayPal’s willingness to freeze your money was so well received! Press around the story was whirling, starting with coverage on TechCrunch:
Since some of the biggest points of difference that WePay offered were dependability, security, and customer service that PayPal has often been accused of lacking.
Taking a jab at their competitor with this stunt wasn’t just for the random, pointless press; it got people talking about a problem WePay truly hoped to address.
And their results were truly amazing.
Emotional influence and persuasion
Budweiser puppy love that was, by most accounts, the biggest winner of the 2014 Super Bowl. There are no better means of influence or the power of persuasion than emotion. Hands down the best, in our opinion.
Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that the experiences are important to remember.
Check out this ad here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQB7QRyF4p4
There are eight basic, universal emotions – joy, surprise, anticipation, acceptance, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Successful appeals to these basic emotions consolidate stories and the desired calls to action in the lasting memories of audiences.
Budweiser is awesome at playing to all these emotions. Their results prove it.
Build creative marketing campaigns … visual elements
Use pictures/visuals to convey the message much better than words. “Seeing is believing” and “actions speak louder than words” are two common sayings that reflect a bias and preference for visual presentation.
Does Samsung have another winning marketing strategy?
Here is a four-minute Samsung ad with 15-20 new features shown for their iPhone. No talking. And so simple that you quickly grasp the features and don’t lose interest. And the coordinated music has a way to keep you tied in. Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?
This ad subtly grabs and holds attention based on a great music soundtrack, no speaking, and a total reliance of superb visuals.
Letting the visuals totally carry the messages.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec
Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
