Marketing Inspiration #36.2

Your weekly dose of data-driven marketing insights - Advertisers Watching Ads

Marketing Inspiration on Advertisers Watching Ads - our show where brands watch other brands’ ads and discuss what they liked - and often, what they didn’t! - in partnership with Contagious.

Sometimes, a brand decides to capture audiences’ attention by producing an ad that’s simply… weird. From eerie clips to some stuff that just got our guests scratching their heads, here are some marketing wisdom bits about weird campaigns we’ve seen on the show.?

“It’s almost impossible to sell phones these days. They’re all kind of the same. So they made it quite surreal and also capitalised on the insight that, especially if you’re an Apple consumer, if you ever think about changing your phone, it feels like hard work.” - Jerry Daykin , Head of International Media, Restaurant Brands International

Samsung’s Join the Flip Side ad is quirky, surreal, and quite fun. Being a challenger to Apple is no easy feat and our guests agreed that the brand needed to do something unusual to stand out. After all, the phone’s design itself is unusual and breaks with what has become the norm for smartphones. The key bit of creative effectiveness in this ad? The storytelling is gripping enough that it keeps the viewer hooked until the end. Like Jerry put it, “you wouldn’t sit through a two-minute video of them telling you the features, but [with this ad] time kind of flew by.”

“This app engagement piece is hugely important. These weight glitch meals, that’s such social media fodder. I would share it. I think anyone would share that and, when you see it on your socials, you may start to think about going to Burger King.” - Mary Beth Findlay Sisti , Director, Product Management, Lowe’s Companies, Inc. (formerly Director, Web Strategy & Digital Experience, GE Healthcare)

The gamer community is notoriously difficult to appeal to, so Burger King even went so far as to mess with their own product to make a breakthrough. The Burger Glitch ad was a universal hit on social media and got lots of different people talking. The concept is intriguing enough even for non gamers, while also appealing to that audience with its interactive app. Besides, gamers hate ads in games, but they do like authenticity - so making them think was a clever move by the brand.?

“The media that you're buying is not necessarily the end product is probably the key here. Creative has to work very, very hard in order to make that sort of thing stand on its own two feet. Really, really interesting creative, hard to execute.” - Simon Short , former Digital & Media Director, Huawei

Liquid Death’s Biggest Ad Ever is big, bold, and very American. It’s all about enticing a different brand to advertise on their own packaging, which is, at first glance, weird. But, if executed correctly, it could magnify their reach and be a brilliant talking point. So leaving aside the interesting creative, will this project yield much for Liquid Death? The jury’s still out…?

Many thanks to all of our guests:

Michael Klein (Principal at Klein4Retail Consulting LLC, former Global Director of Industry Strategy and Marketing for Retail, Travel and Consumer Goods Industries at Adobe), Andy Oakes (CEO of the Bluestripe Group), Jerry Daykin (Head of International Media, Restaurant Brands International), Nanki Singh (Senior Brand Manager at AB InBev, formerly at Mast-J?germeister SE), Mary Beth Findlay Sisti (Director, Product Management, Lowe’s Companies, Inc. (formerly Director, Web Strategy & Digital Experience, GE Healthcare)), Justin Pearse (Editor of New Digital Age and Co-Founder of Bluestripe Group), Shaaf Tauqeer (Senior Manager Paid Media & Campaigns at Riyadh Air, formerly Audience and March Manager at easyJet), and Simon Short (former Digital & Media Director, Huawei).?

Do you want to share your thoughts about these ads or suggest a new one for us to debate? Email us on [email protected] .