Truly Deeply/Madly

A Stand­out Cre­ative Cam­paign
There’s plenty of talk about the chang­ing face of adver­tis­ing. Every day I read about the frag­men­ta­tion of mar­kets, of chan­nels, of brand mes­sages, of how the task of con­nect­ing to con­sumers is becom­ing more and more chal­leng­ing. And then you come across an exam­ple of an ad that has so effec­tively risen to those chal­lenges, it sim­ply reminds you that cre­ativ­ity is the answer. A work col­league sent this absolute rip­per of an inte­grated cam­paign for Heineken to me today.

A Remark­able Brand Ges­ture
This is cer­tainly one of the most pow­er­ful exam­ples an unfor­get­table brand ges­ture I’ve seen over recent years. I loved this unique brand expe­ri­ence for the fol­low­ing reasons:

- Heineken clearly under­stands their mar­ket and thus their most vul­ner­a­ble pres­sure points.

- They took a huge leap of faith. Any uncon­ven­tional cam­paign idea requires the sup­port of a coura­geous client, but a savvy client under­stands that if the mes­sage is on brand, the risk is diminished.

- The idea is both unique and highly cre­ative. If you’re going to go guer­rilla, you need to make sure your idea is big enough to gen­er­ate buzz. The pay-off for a guer­rilla cam­paign is in the inter­est it fires-up, and how you lever­age  that. This brand ges­ture has gen­uine Wood­stock poten­tial — as the years pass, more and more peo­ple will claim to have been in that theater.

- One of the golden rules of brand­ing is; ‘don’t tell me, show me’. Most brands spend alot of energy telling us who they are instead of demon­strat­ing it. Heineken jumped straight to the demon­stra­tion part, leav­ing the telling to oth­ers and at the same time align­ing nicely to Heineken’s ‘Made to Enter­tain’ proposition.

- Brand the­ater attracts inter­est and pos­i­tive asso­ci­a­tion from a wider and broader audi­ence. One great thing about cre­at­ing unique brand expe­ri­ences is the extent to which they engage peo­ple who were not nec­es­sar­ily con­nected to the brand pre­vi­ously. We know that once peo­ple have par­tic­i­pated in the brand expe­ri­ence, either directly or through passing-on the buzz, they are likely to become brand advocates.

- It doesn’t have to be on-line to be Social. The Heineken cam­paign is a great reminder that the rules of social media apply just as effec­tively, if-not more off-line than they do on-line.

So What Were the Results?

- 1.500.000 peo­ple watched the event on live TV via Sky Sport,

- 10.000.000 peo­ple saw it in the news the day after, and

- Heineken had 5.000.000 unique vis­i­tors to their site in the two weeks after the event.

The risk Heineken took with this cam­paign has proven to be worth­while. The ROI from this cam­paign is remark­ably high by any stan­dards. The les­son for any brand is that if you under­stand your tar­get mar­ket and have clar­ity around your brand like Heineken do, you too can take the leap and with a great idea, cre­ate a remark­able brand experience.

Tim Wood
Design Creative

Tags: Brand Design, brand designers, Brand Experience, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, brand-designers-Melbourne, Brand-Storytelling, Champions League, Creative, Experiences, Graphic Design Melbourne, Heineken, Heineken Beer, Milan, Real Madrid, Real madrid Vs Milan, Sky Sport, Small Brands Big Personalities, Thinking, tim-wood, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 8:45 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Brand Voice, Brand-Storytelling, Creative, Experiences, Graphic Design Melbourne, Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.