The Top Nine Best Campaign Stories From February 2015

|

Successful campaigns are the best lesson to learn for startups.

As always it’s necessary to add in the caveat that you won’t find any hard metrics or ROI in the following post. It’s meant to be for inspiration and keeping up-to-date with what’s going on. There is a presidential native advertising, Barclays bank, the Capital One Cup, Topshop, The Hunger Games, and more! Let’s start with the first successful story of:

1. British Airways

British Airways has recruited Oxford University’s a capella group Out Of The Blue for a video spoofing Wham’s Club Tropicana. The choir gained notoriety last year when its version of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie went viral. It now has 5.6m YouTube views. BA’s Wham tribute coincides with a period that is apparently the most stressful for booking summer holidays. Teaser photos were posted on Twitter and Instagram in early February and the video has now been shared across BA’s social platforms. It will also be shown on the airline’s in-flight entertainment systems.

 

2. Obama and Buzzfeed

It seems that native advertising can work, as long as you can call on the services of Barack Obama. The President partnered with Buzzfeed’s video team for a post aimed at driving people to the government’s healthcare site. The two-minute clip was embedded on Facebook and has been viewed more than 50 million times.

obama-buzzfeed-video

3. Barclays

UK bank Barclays has announced that users of its Pingit app will be able to transfer money to other people by using their Twitter handle. It works if the user has connected their Twitter and Pingit profiles.

barclays-beer-tweet

4. Nestle Internship

Nestle and Twitter have put a 10-week paid internship up for grabs to the person who submits the best CV using Vine. Applicants can either fill in a form or submit a six-second video explaining why they deserve the internship. The applicant with the best Vine video will be awarded a place at the assessment centre, to take place on 14 April, alongside 12 other participants. The process is apparently already live, though people can’t find where they need to submit the application, nor can they find anyone who has actually used the #6secondCV hashtag on Twitter or Vine.

5. Capital One Cup

On Sunday Wembley hosted the final of the world’s least prestigious football competition – the Capital One Cup. Spurs took on Chelsea in a really dull game that saw Tottenham lose 2-0. The night before it was a different story, as Tottenham’s fans outvoted their rivals on Twitter meaning the Wembley arch was lit up in the team’s colours. Fans had to vote using either #ChelseaAtWembley or #SpursAtWembley.

capital-one-cup-tweet

According to Topsy, the Chelsea hashtag has been used 4,331 times compared to 4,228 for the Spurs one, so something has gone awry somewhere.

6. Burberry

Burberry fell back on a tried and tested social trick for London Fashion Week, tweeting personalised images to other Twitter users. During its runway show on 23 February users could take a photo of the models using the hashtag #Tweetcam. Burberry would then tweet the image with the person’s hashtag and a timestamp.

It’s obviously a bit of a gimmick, but one that helps people identify with the brand and gives an extra reason to tune in to the fashion show.

burberry-tweetcam

7. The Hunger Games

Lionsgate has created a social media game to promote the release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay on DVD. Users have to follow clues via promoted posts on Facebook that lead to Twitter and other partners sites including IGN, Break and Celebuzz. They can then unlock bonus content by cracking codes and completing challenges.

the-hunger-games-mockingjay

There’s also a crowd-sourced element to the campaign, as hashtags will be aggregated to unlock additional content as part of a virtual rebellion, which obviously ties into the film’s narrative. It’s an ambitious campaign and one that makes clever use of social ads.

8. Pret’s hot food tour

Pret A Manger took a branded food van on a tour of 12 British cities to give out samples of its porridge and quinoa rice pots. The tour was promoted through social, with local Instagram users recruited to take photos of the food in each location. Pret then posted the photos on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and used locally targeted paid media with the hashtag #HotPret to reveal which city it was visiting on that day.

pret-tweet

9. Topshop

Another London Fashion Week campaign, this time involving Topshop, Twitter and outdoor advertising.

Topshop broadcast details of next season’s trends onto eight outdoor advertising screens in the UK by listening into what industry influencers were talking about on Twitter.

topshop-twitter-campaign

As key trends emerged, they appeared in the TOPSHOP trend cloud as hashtags – for instance #colourblocking, #pleats and #utility. Customers could then tweet @Topshop using one of the trend hashtags to receive a curated shopping list inspired by the trend.

This campaign is a neat way of tying up offline and online media, though the tweet template was quite vague.

topshop-modernism-tweet