Most ads quickly vanish into the background or get lost under the avalanche of advertising we are subjected to these days. Another CRM email becomes unopened email number 13453, a banner ad follows you around the internet like a lost dog and sponsored posts squeeze themselves between Work Tom’s holiday pics and someone being “thrilled to share” something.
But occasionally a brand does something that makes people stop and pay attention – and that’s the stuff that gets remembered. In today’s world where the volume of both free digital collateral in the form of emails and posts along with paid media has reached terminal velocity, some of the more memorable and most refreshing campaigns are being kicked off with outdoor or out-of-home. Here are a couple of cracking examples.
The Grass Really Is Greener
To promote the second series of The Gentlemen, Netflix leased a 65m by 65m patch of land beneath the Gatwick flight path then painted the field green with the words “OUR GRASS IS GREENER.”
There is a joke in there for anyone familiar with the programme’s weed-growing aristocrats, as well as using the chance to give an opportunistic nod to Britain’s unusually dry summer and the baked beige fields across the land. The advert was entirely hand-painted and the field leased from a nature reserve, with some or all of the dosh going to support local environmental initiatives. For people sitting on the right side of the plane, it’s definitely going to stand out, yet the real genius comes from what happens next. This ad leaping up out of the landscape will have made heaps of passengers reach for their phones and start sharing… those who genuinely want to share the catchy concept as well as that strange bunch who take any excuse to post about being on holiday, or being about to go on holiday or just getting back from holiday. Within hours, there were plenty of pics snapped through those always slightly grubby airplane windows flying around the internet. And then on the back of that, anyone who is flying in or out of Gatwick is going to have a friend or two who’ll tell them about the Netflix advert in the field, and how they should keep an eye out for it.
Billboards on the side of roads have been around for years – is there now going to be more and more flight path advertising on the back of the success of Netflix’s idea? Although as with many great creative works, this concept was a reworking of a prank carried out by Max Fosh a few years ago (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-61541224), when he created a sign saying “Welcome to Luton” on the same final approach in order to confuse or worry passengers coming into land – or hoping to land – at Gatwick.
Fancy a Pint?
Häagen-Dazs used a billboard in Toronto featuring a tub of ice cream and the words “Let’s grab a pint.” Over the pond, ice cream is commonly sold in pints whereas in the UK we choose to reserve the term for beer and milk. Stella Artois chose to have a cheeky play when its team discovered that the billboard space immediately beside the Häagen-Dazs advert was available and within a week it had installed its response “Are you asking us out?”
This was not a carefully choreographed collaboration planned six months earlier in a meeting involving 14 people, a mood board and conversations about brand synergy – Stella simply spotted an opportunity and moved quickly, maybe on the back of seeing this kind of inter-brand back and forth working well through social. Häagen-Dazs then sent a mobile billboard around Toronto carrying another message “Depends, You into spooning?
By this point people were no longer looking at two brands advertising ice cream and beer. They were watching a very public courtship involving pints, spoons and some fairly shameless wordplay. A straightforward outdoor advert became a story, and more importantly a story people wanted to follow and share.
From Field to Feed
These campaigns work because they capitalise on the relationship between physical and digital marketing and – as mentioned above – by applying some of the same thinking used by social media marketers. Online adverts usually appear because somebody has paid to put them in front of us. We tolerate them, scroll past them or wait impatiently for the little cross to appear. Social sharing works differently; people choose who they follow and as such can curate their feeds. You can choose to follow people who post content that genuinely interests you, rather than receiving adverts for something that you have no interest in, yet for which you do match the campaigns target demographic.
Netflix transformed a field into something people wanted to photograph. Stella turned somebody else’s billboard into the opening line of its own advert and Häagen-Dazs recognised the fun and kept the conversation going – it was this clever and entertaining thinking that made the campaigns stand out, yet most of the actual awareness would have come from social sharing. I’ve never been to Toronto yet this hit my screen.
For the people developing creative campaigns and social media strategy, there is a useful lesson here. Great social content does not always need to begin with a post, a video or be part of a carefully populated content calendar. Sometimes it begins with a field, a billboard or another brand leaving the door temptingly ajar for a bit of chat. These adverts weren’t inflicted on people as they booked some train tickets or tried to find that brand of tea that Auntie Sue likes for when she comes around next Thursday, like the online equivalent of the charity chugger outside your local shop who pops up and pesters you every time you walk past. By being something different or something delivered in a different way they earned their way into the feeds of millions of people.
