A look at the most interesting, captivating and successful ad campaigns that straddled the latter half of 2014 and the front half of 2015.
Normally something like this is reserved for the traditional year-end lists, however the period between June 2014 and this month is the eligibility period of The Masters of Marketing awards, so I thought this was a good enough excuse to buck with tradition.
Jack Daniel’s is a universally recognised brand, but often for different reasons. Most of its marketing focuses deeply on heritage and tradition.
A down-home, deep fried sense of warm hospitality that permeates its ads and copy like a gentle waft of charcoal.
It’s also permeated by images of Lemmy pouring it on his cornflakes after a night on the Sunset Strip.
Combining these two perceptions is no easy task, but JD’s new ‘Bar Stories’ campaign manages it with aplomb.
Airbnb rebranded earlier this summer and it was pretty hard to miss, at one point generating enough hundreds of thousands of tweets to top the global trends (partly due to its similarity to an existing company logo).
Recently I listened to some of the guys from DesignStudio, the agency behind the rebrand, talking about the joys and stresses of such a monumental project.
I thought I’d share some tidbits from their presentation and discuss what a brand and a logo means, as well as how one should go about changing it. I’ll be concentrating on the creative side of the brief, as opposed to equally important considerations for those in the same boat, such as SEO (if you’re picking a new name or slogan) etc.
So, what did a creative rebrand of Airbnb entail?
For more creative and branding stories, check out the Festival of Marketing, November 12-13th in London.
Agile email creative is the formatting of images not before send, or at send (with automated or dynamic content) but at the moment the customer opens or re-opens an email.
This allows one to change pictures in an email depending on a host of variables, on their own or combined, in a rules-based system.
A lot of what this agile creative can achieve boils down to improving the user journey when they open an email. So, for example, an image can present latest availability of a product, so that when the customer clicks through from a product image, she isn’t surprised by lack of stock and doesn’t subsequently distrust brand comms.
I’ve previously talked to Movable Ink, a specialist in simplified email build and agile email creative (see this post for an overview and some great comments). Recently I also spoke to Matt Hayes of Kickdynamic, another agile email specialist.
We discussed the possibilities of the technology and how, although not a complex premise, agile email is enlivening the channel whilst increasing conversion rates from email marketing.
In this post I thought I’d detail some more examples of agile email creative and discuss what benefits they hold.
Agile email creative means creating and curating email content not before send, or at send (with automated or dynamic content) but at the moment the customer opens or re-opens an email. This agile creative allows the marketer to change pictures in an email depending on time of opening, location of opening (via IP address), weather […]
Emails, from one to the next you either love them or hate them. Bad ones are deleted and I even enter the bin and ‘delete forever’ if I think a particular example is karmically altering my inbox.
In the past I’ve written about some things I like to see in emails. I’ve been on the look-out again and here you’ll find six companies (B2B and B2C) that sent me emails deserving of mention for their creative strategies.
Design and copywriting are hard to teach, I’m certainly not somebody that sees natural order in things. See what you think of these examples and feel free to tell me if you would have deleted them in an instant.
With native advertising the buzz phrase among marketers for 2014, London is poised to lead the way in innovation in what is one of the most creative digital ad formats to emerge in recent years.
In November AirBnB co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk claimed that London was ‘stuck in a Silicon Valley Roundabout’ and held back by its failure to produce a ‘billion dollar’ online business.
Many in London found the comments annoying. Phil Cooper, a digital veteran who launched the UK’s first video ad network and was until last year European MD of Brightroll, was one of them.
Cooper, who launched his latest digital venture six months ago, London based accommodation platform Kippsy.com, a competitor of AirBnB in the London market, believes that what London does best is innovation; taking an established model, technology or platform and turning it on its head.
Google helps us all market our services. That statement can start a healthy debate amongst many in the media, but I think I’ll stick with it.
Of course, Google has to market itself, too.
Even the biggest and most successful companies must market themselves in some channels. Apple, for example, may shun social media, but it’s all over the television and out-of-home and has a distinctive presence on many high streets.
So, I thought I’d round up some examples of Google’s marketing that have stuck in my mind and continue to leave me mindful of Google’s all-conquering innovation.
Hope you enjoy!
The Christmas-themed emails have just begun to arrive in my inbox, so what better time to gather some email marketing tips?
I’ve been asking a number of email marketing experts about the best tactics for the Xmas shopping season.
Topics include how often to send emails, the importance of mobile, and email creative this Christmas…
The makers of Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons seem to have a winning formula that should be attractive to brands looking for a guarantee of success with games.
But is the creation of a successul game a science or an art?
Until recently, the development of marketing technologies has occurred at a high enough pace to preclude a new definition of marketing.
But now, we feel the new discipline can be defined in broad terms, with digital pervading pretty much everything you do as marketers.
Next week the Festival of Marketing debuts in the city of London, with conferences, events and parties all hung off the core tenets of Econsultancy’s Modern Marketing Manifesto. At the festival we’ll add the detail to the manifesto. Which brands are doing precisely what? And is it working? How have benchmarks moved?
If you haven’t seen the festival line-up, check out the website, and if you haven’t read our manifesto, check that out, too. We’ve had great feedback on our new definition of marketing, with many of you ‘signing’ in agreement by commenting on this post.
As part of this search for feedback, we recently surveyed around 700 Econsultancy users and assayed what level of agreement they show with the ‘pillars’ of the manifesto.
Although we had already incorporated your opinions into our draft, we wanted to find out how precisely the final treatise hits the nail on the head, or if indeed we’ve missed the nail and struck a thumb.
When the dust settles on all the current activity around technology and data, what will be left?
Creativity is the answer. But let us wind back a little.
Creativity is one of the core elements of our Modern Marketing Manifesto. It says “we believe we need creativity just as much as we need technology”.
However, most of the energy and activity currently is directed towards data and technology.