Four: VW Jetta GLI Art Heist, Canada
Volkswagen again? Sorry, but as mentioned above they’ve always done interesting work. And no, this isn’t here as a boobie prize because we need some Cancon. This brilliant campaign made noise all over the internet and world. The point? To show you could do something beautiful with the Jetta GLI.
Using slo-mo photography and the Jetta’s lights at night, they created beautiful designs: art, they say. Then they posted framed and signed originals at random spots around Canada’s biggest cities, hinted online where they were, and filmed people stealing them. Then they encouraged the thieves to ‘fess up, which they did.
The buzz was epic. Rather than hoping people would watch an ad between baseball game innings, VW got a million Facebook impressions and 2 million twitter impressions.
Three: Nissan Rumble, the Nordic Countries (Run Out of Finland)
If you’ve never been to Nordic Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland; speaking from a different language family, Finland is actually not Scandinavian) you’re probably not aware of the intense rivalry between these nations. To show off their crossovers to young urban types, Kia exploited these rivalries on Facebook and other soc-nets. Each nation supplied celebrities to race across the four countries. Racers had to stop whenever people stopped tweeting. It was bigger than Abba and Five Girls With Dragon Tattoos.
Over 2.8 million people sought out this campaign every day: a reversal of the advertising cliché ‘cutting through the clutter’, this literally was cluttering their attention.
Two: Toyota Prius Bike, USA
There’s a popular phrase in advertising regarding standing out: when everybody else zigs, you zag. So, how best to demonstrate green efficiency? How about an expensive TV spot with fawns gamboling through the forest while a happy white family watches from within their hybrid? Meh. It’s just that the intended audience doesn’t even watch TV.
Instead, Toyota’s agency made something utterly newsworthy. It’s a bicycle – not a car ad campaign – that features the same principles the Prius brand espouses. Example? You can change gears with your brain waves! Cool! Again, they got heaps news coverage, plus the audience themselves to talk about it, rather than paying for media placement.
One: Mercedes-Benz F CELL Invisible, Germany
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M-B wanted to show off their fuel cell technology. Its emissions are zero and hence ‘invisible’ to the environment. So they covered the car with LEDs – creating a huge mobile monitor – and attached cameras to either side. While driving, each camera posted what it was seeing on the opposite side’s LEDs, effectively rendering it invisible. Brilliant. Then they drove it around Germany and got everybody else to talk about it.
It’s thinking like these campaigns that have me excited about the advertising industry again for the first time in over a decade.
