There is nothing worse than sitting around a boardroom table with your creative team and no one is able to come up with amazing ideas for your next advertising campaigns. With advertising, there is no second chance at making a first impression. If your advert hasn’t grabbed the viewers attention in the first 10 seconds then it is ineffective. Adverts are costly and time consuming to produce, so make sure your one stands out in the crowd of noise. It’s very important to showcase your product in a clever way. Some companies take this aspect too far, and create an ad that has to be explained which by that point they have failed. We recently put together 5 tips to make your TV advert stand out but our team chose 5 of the most successful advertising campaigns help kickstart your creative juices.
Mercedes Motion-Blur Illusion
If you love clever illusions that mess with your mind, then you’re going to get a kick out of this new guerrilla advertising for Mercedes-Benz. To launch their new 2012 C-Class Coupe, they worked with BBDO Toronto, Canada to come up with this creative idea. A Benz was parked in front of a motion blurred wall, sidewalk, and billboard that read: “Looks fast. Even in park. The 450hp 2012 C-Class Coupe.”
Nike Run
Actual park benches were removed all over various cities to promote the new running shoes launched by Nike.
Absolut Vodka: The Absolut Bottle
Despite having no distinct shape, Absolut made its bottle the most recognizable bottle in the world. Their campaign, which featured print ads showing bottles “in the wild,” was so successful that they didn’t stop running it for 25 years. It’s the longest uninterrupted ad campaign ever and comprises over 1,500 separate ads. No matter how boring your product looks, it doesn’t mean you can’t tell your story in an interesting way.
Dove: Real Beauty
In their Real Beauty Sketches campaign, Dove created ads around a social experiment in which an FBI-trained sketch artist was asked to draw a female volunteers twice: First, as each woman described herself and the second time, as a random stranger described her. 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 results? The different videos showing Dove’s sketches were viewed more than 114 million times, shared 3.74 million times, uploaded in 25 languages, and seen in 110 countries. The PR and blogger media impression amounted to over 4 billion. It clearly resonated with their audience and people were touched both by the ads and by the statistics Dove used to back up their message.
Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
The very first part of Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, created by Wieden + Kennedy and launched in February 2010, was the following commercial. It became a viral success practically overnight: