Interactive Advertising Campaigns

Enhancing The Advertising Experience With Interactivity

Guerrilla marketing has been hailed as the king of quirky advertising for years but, like everything else, it will eventually lose effectiveness and be replaced by the next big thing. The next "big thing" could be interactive advertising campaigns. To get a message across to consumers, marketers must stimulate the receivers’ brain. Interactive campaigns do this, as well as enticing consumers, which is why they are so important. Interactive ads create a buzz and get people talking because many of them end up going viral. The campaigns leave people with a close connection to the brand; this in turn creates a loyal following. The five campaigns featured below are a few examples of brilliant interactive adverts. 

Fitness First:

Health club chain Fitness First released this terrifying campaign in the Netherlands. Unsuspecting commuters were faced with viewing their weight when they took a seat at the converted bench/scale. Scary to say the least, but extraordinarily clever in my opinion. But what do you think? Cheeky? Helpful? Or just totally inappropriate?

Amnesty International:

Here, Amnesty International use eyeball tracking software to drive home the message of their campaign - "It happens when no one is watching". When no one is looking the ad shows a man abusing his wife. Then, when someone looks at the ad, it waits a few seconds for the message to sink in before the couple stop fighting and look normal again. To me, it is a fantastically effective concept and a brilliant use of the technology to convey a particular message. 

Nikon:

Nikon used this billboard to promote its new D700 model in Korea. Passersby in a busy Seoul subway station automatically triggered a deluge of flashing camera lights as they followed the red carpet all the way out of the station and into a mall - directly into a store where they could purchase the new model.

Nike:

Nike created this unique interactive billboard as a charity advertisement. The billboard invited passersby in Argentina to have a run on the treadmill. For each kilometer run, Nike would donate a set amount to UNICEF. 

Adobe CS3:

Adobe launched this interactive billboard in NYC to promote the release of their new creative suite. Pedestrians walking by were picked up with infrared sensors and were then able to control a projected slider on the bottom of the wall.  Check out the video here to see what happened next.

Guerrilla Marketing

"What Just Happened?!"

“The soul and essence of guerrilla marketing remain as always - achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money.” 

– Jay Conrad Levinson

Consumers are exposed to an astounding number of advertisements every day. The truth of the matter is that, as human beings, we simply don’t have the mental capacity to process the sheer volume of all these messages so the majority of them are ignored. Advertisers have to think of new and exciting ways to grab people’s attention every day. So why not use guerrilla marketing?

Guerrilla marketing is, ‘a tactic in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service’. Guerrilla marketing is different than traditional marketing in that it often relies on personal interaction and has a smaller budget, and it focuses on smaller groups of promoters that are responsible for getting the word out in a particular location rather than on wide-spread media campaigns. 

Below are ten of the best guerrilla marketing campaigns that I have previously stumbled upon (in no particular order).

Rimmel

Frontline

Amnesty International

Spiderman 2

3M

Swiss Skydive

KitKat

MTV Switch

Folgers Coffee

The Sopranos

Haul Videos: A New Kind of Online Marketing

The best part of shopping seems to be, not racking up the goods themselves, but that moment when you get home and dig through the bags to try it all on again for your friends, family, and well just for the fun right?  Well that’s kind of the idea behind YouTube’s growing phenomenon known as the ‘Haul Video’.

A haul video goes a little something like this: a young girl sits in her bedroom showing off all her latest purchases in front of a webcam talking about mundane details like price, colour, features etc.  It seems as if something like this would hardly fathom that much attention right? Wrong! By late 2010, nearly a quarter of a million haul videos had been shared on YouTube alone. According to Chelsea Maughan, a YouTube spokesperson, videos uploaded to the site with 'haul' in the title have almost doubled over the past four years.  

According to a recent article in the guardian it seems in this crowded world Bethany Mota is queen. Her online empire consists of 1.2 million Twitter followers, 2.3 million Instagram followers, and 5.1 million YouTube subscribers. Check out one of her videos here:

So what does this have to do with marketer's? Well for a start, haul videos are a great way to connect with potential customers and showcase products. The hauler gets some cool free stuff and the company gets free publicity. Everybody wins! Leading retailers like J.C. Penny, Forever 21 and American Eagle are just a few of those that are capitalizing on the trend, offering girls gift cards to shop at their stores with the expectation that they will post haul videos bragging about their latest retail hauls. J.C. Penny took it one step further by hiring at least six young girls to produce back to school haul videos. Target has also created their own mock "Happy Haul-idays" clips.

So what do you guys make of this phenomenon? I have to confess that after spending a whole afternoon doing some research, I can see how some find them highly addictive and entertaining. I'd love to hear your comments. Are these young girls marketing opportunities waiting to be snapped up or are they all just dying fads?