15 Most successful digital campaigns and what you can learn from them!
Every single day we spend hours scrolling up and down on our mobiles. Looking at the statistics of people spending time on social media, it’s for sure that brands that fail to market themselves using this method are missing out on a great way of creating their presence in a place where their audiences are actively hanging out.
Statistics reveal that there are several businesses working merely on marketing and branding through social media. If we look at the numbers, social media users grew by 202 million between April 2018 and April 2019.
In this article, we have compiled more than a dozen global digital marketing campaigns that have made a mark through their remarkably meaningful content and designs.
Instagram’s Most-liked Egg Teams Up With Hulu
A picture of a plain little egg on Instagram beat Kylie Jenner as the most-liked Instagram post of all time. Weeks after garnering millions of Likes, we saw Instagram’s most-liked egg cracking to reveal a mental health advert. Revealed post-Super Bowl on Hulu in a short video, we see the egg saying “Recently I’ve started to crack” before it begins to crumble. The video finishes, before a URL for Mental Health America, appears.
Worldwide Breast Cancer – Know your Lemons
Worldwide Breast Cancer broke the taboo and fear of breast cancer by sharing an illustration that used 12 lemons to show the signs of breast cancer. The image has been picked up on multiple social media platforms and has been seen by over 200 million people so far.
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Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
Old Spice’s ‘Smell Like a Man, Man’ campaign launched just prior to the 2010 Superbowl became a viral video sensation. It’s received more than 50 million views on YouTube. 5 months after the campaign was launched, Old Spice came up with a Response Campaign, as they wanted to engage with their users in a more personal way. On the morning of July 13, 2010, Old Spice posted a simple message on their social channels which said
For the next two days, Isaiah Mustafa, dubbed as “Mr Old Spice,” responded to the tweets with the help of nearly 200 personalized video responses that were posted on YouTube. More than 2,000 users sent queries which included Ashton Kutcher, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, and ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos. The “response” videos received super positive response, they were viewed more than 46 million times. In fact, in the first 24 hours the response videos were viewed more times on YouTube than President Obama’s 2008 election-night acceptance speech.
Here’re some interesting numbers to look at
- 1.2 billion earned media impressions, including features on national broadcast networks and international media outlets
- 2700% increase in Twitter followers
- 800% increase in Facebook fan interaction
- 300% increase in traffic to the Old Spice website
- Old Spice has become the #1 Most Viewed Sponsored YouTube Channel
Source: https://www.pg.com/en_US/downloads/innovation/factsheet_OldSpice.pdf
This Twitter Program Generated $180,000 In Purchases For A Leading Coffee Chain
The @Tweetacoffee program lets users in U.S. buy coffee for friends on Twitter. Users had to sync their Starbucks account to their Twitter account and tweet to @tweetacoffee and the Twitter handle of the friend they wanted to gift the coffee to. Starbucks then sent the recipient a $5 digital eGift. The recipients could redeem the Starbucks Card e-gift at the participating stores in the U.S. The program was a follow up to Starbucks Facebook eGift service which let users send gift certificates to other Facebook users.
Impact
In less than two months, since its launch, the program generated $180,000 in purchases, as per the research firm Keyhole. Their research also found on the first day of the program, 32% of the purchases occurred. Also, more than 27,000 fans used the program and 34% of users bought multiple gift cards, the research firm said.
Key Takeaway
Human interaction is at the center of the campaign. You want to send a cup of coffee to your friend/colleague/family – you can do it via a tweet. It’s simple and easy! The simplicity and the seamlessness of the entire experience – right from ordering to the recipient getting the eGift- made it a hit ( and a talking point) with the users + publishers. And since it was launched on Twitter, it gave the brand an easy opportunity to leverage the social channel’s amplification power.
Intel Social Media App Campaign. +130,000,000 Impressions On Facebook WithIn 2 Weeks Of Launch
The app lets users connect to the Intel Museum of Me site via their Facebook account. Once connected, the app gathers social data and images of the users to create a mock museum exhibit in the form of a three-minute-long video. There’s one room in the exhibit that features pictures of the user, one features pictures of their friends, and there’s also a room that displays the user’s most posted words. Once the video stops playing, the users get an invite to share their Museum of Me exhibit with their friends on Facebook. The app was more than helping users visualize their Facebook activities. It was an ad for the company’s Core i5 processors. However, it doesn’t become clear until the very end of the video.
Impact:
Within 2 weeks of launch, it garnered +540,000 likes, +790,000 shares on Facebook, and +130,000,000 impressions on Facebook. It also won numerous awards including six Cannes Lions: 3 Gold, 2 Silver and a Bronze.
First-Ever Drinkable Advertising Campaign Coca Cola
Coke Zero launched its drinkable advertising campaign in 2015 during the Final Four and returned in a big way where we saw the brand partnering with ESPN’s ‘College Game Day.’ The campaign was aimed at making more people try the zero-calorie drink through different channels, including billboards, TV, radio, and social media.
The renewed campaign included 10 new football-themed spots where several ESPN personalities such as Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit were seen asking the viewers to open the Shazam app on their mobile phones and place it near the ad.
At ESPN ‘Game Day’ sites, ‘drinkable jerseys’ were given to select college students. Social media activities included ‘drinkable content’ with coupons related to ‘Game Day’ broadcasts.
Coke Zero Sugar’s ad awareness score significantly improved after the campaign. Its score rose from 6% in early July to 17% in the last weeks of August. Also, the purchase consideration rose from 11 to 16 over the same time period. It was reported that Coke Zero’s global sales volume rose by 6% in the second quarter (following the Final Four push), a 1% increase over its first-quarter results.
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The Name Change Stunt Helped This Company Sell 4 Times More Burgers
A week later, the company revealed that the B stood for Burgers and the brand did a lot of activities around promoting their new “Ultimate Steakburgers” which included changing store signage and the Twitter handle to IHOb.
“IHOP makes world-famous pancakes, so we felt like the best way to convince them that we are as serious about our new line of Ultimate Steakburgers as we are about our pancakes, was to change our name to IHOb,” said Brad Haley, chief marketing officer for IHOb restaurants, in a statement. “We’ve pancaked pancakes for 60 years now, so it’s the perfect time to start burgerin’ burgers.”
However, the change of IHOP to IHOb wasn’t a permanent one; the company reverted to IHOP – but the stunt proved to be one of the greatest brand awareness campaigns. The company’s “word of mouth” score soared high following the name change as per YouGov’s BrandIndex data. In fact, it reached its highest since 2012.
Between June 1 and June 13, there were 1.8 Million mentions of IHOB and 1 million mentions of IHOP on Twitter, as per social media management company Sprinklr. The name change helped the company sell 4 times more burgers, at one point the company was selling 500,000 burgers per week, Chief Marketing Officer Brad Haley said at a marketing conference.
This Delivery Campaign Fetches 50.8 Million Impressions
Always #LikeAGirl
This amazing campaign was created to raise awareness on how gender stereotypes have a big impact on girls during puberty. The campaign was inspired by a study from Research Now and sponsored by Always – which found that more than half of the girls who responded said they experienced a drop in confidence at puberty. The #LikeaGirl campaign began with a YouTube video posted in June 2014 where young women and men were asked to do things ‘like a girl’, for example to fight like a girl or throw like a girl. Women, boys, and men reacted in a silly and self-deprecating manner. However, when prepubescent girls were asked to do the same activities, they reacted with confidence and amazing self-belief.
Impact
The #LikeaGirl campaign began with a YouTube video and racked up 31 million views in one week. Always Twitter followers tripled in the first three months and the YouTube Channel subscribers increased by 4339%. There were 177,000 #LikeAGirl tweets in the first three months, including celebs such as Melinda Gates, Gloria Steinem, Chelsea Clinton, and Sarah Silverman. The company reported a higher-than-average lift in brand preference and said that the purchase intent grew more than 50% among the target audience. In a study conducted in December 2014, almost 70% of women and 60% of men said “The video changed my perception of the phrase ‘like a girl'” The popularity of the campaign inspired P&G to air a shortened version for the Super Bowl. The ad aired just twice, but it scored an Ad Effectiveness Rating of 8.8, which was well above the industry average of 4.5.
Key Takeaway
The Always #LikeAGirl campaign is a great example of how social media can help emotional marketing campaigns become viral. In this case, the very relatable hashtag #LikeAGirl not only created awareness but a community around the brand.
Anar Foundation “Only for Children”
Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.
A Spanish charity’s unique take on combating child abuse. The poster can be fully seen only be children due to a lenticular printing technique. When an adult sees the poster he/she only sees a frightened child whereas a child (or anyone under 1.35m tall) sees the message “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you”.
ALS Association – Ice Bucket Challenge
The Ice Bucket Challenge is one of the most talked-about health awareness campaigns with participation from a host of celebrities including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian, and Taylor Swift. Aimed at raising awareness about the disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), the campaign went so viral that in just eight weeks it managed to raise $115 million for the ALS Association. Know more details about the campaign here. See what the founders of the challenge have to say.
Words Can Be Weapons
Repeated extreme verbal abuse is traumatic and as damaging as physical abuse. The multimedia campaign based in China raises awareness about the damage done to kids when they’re constantly being subject to verbal abuse. The video shows 6 teenagers in Shenyang Detention Center recalling their painful childhood memories & how words like Moron, Go away and die, You’re a Disgrace left permanent scars on their psyche. Watch the video; it beautifully shows the words turning into weapons these teenagers used for committing crimes. Started by the Center For Psychological Research in Shenyang in partnership with Ogilvy and Mather Beijing, the campaign wants parents to abandon the old sticks and stones attitude.
Working with artist Yong Xie, Ogilvy Beijing turned the abusive words into pieces of nickel-plated steel. These pieces were reassembled to create weapons such as guns and knives to show how abusive and hurtful words are like weapons. These were showcased at an exhibition in a shopping center in Shenyang via a special site where visitors could watch films and explore the backstories. Also, a hotline was set up where young people experiencing abuse could call in.
The campaign reached 3.2m people. Also, it was reported that 300 calls were made in two weeks to the helpline.
( Source: http://sites.wpp.com/probono/2014/showcase/human-rights/words-can-be-weapons)
Google Glass’s Mother’s Day Video ‘Seeds’
The film, recorded using Google Glass, depicts the journey of a young man from San Francisco to a remote village in India to surprise his mom with a hidden envelope. The video shows a man packing his things in a bag. We see his wife handing him a brown envelope. We then see him traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Tokyo, finally ending up at his place in a remote village in India. Throughout the journey, he holds the brown envelope. When he goes inside his home, he gives his mother the envelope which had a picture of an ultrasound.
The film was created by the alumnus of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, Aneesh Chaganty. Aneesh filmed his entire journey using Google Glass.
Impact
It earned over 56,000 views within the day it was published.
Key Takeaway
The high emotional quotient of the video touched the heartstrings of anyone who saw it. The post was shared by the famous Tollywood (Telugu film industry) director S S Rajamouli on his Facebook timeline as a Mother’s Day greeting and it played a key role in amplifying the reach of the video.
25-minute IKEA Ad Fetches 2.5M Views On YouTube
“Oddly, IKEA” – part of IKEA’s back-to-school marketing campaign – is a 25-minute commercial featuring everyday objects such as fitted sheets, lamps, and metal hangers with the narrator describing each object with different soothing sounds to elicit a positive ASMR feeling for viewers. It was IKEA’s first experimentation with ASMR content and it ran as an extension to the TVC.