Successful and unsuccessful advertising campaigns

Successful Advertising Campaigns

1. Dumb Ways to Die – Metro Trains – McCann Erickson Melbourne

• Target audience = young people who do not usually pay attention to safety notices/warnings.
• A great example of an advertising campaign that effectively uses many different media platforms. This campaign uses video, music, application, game, social media and print. The campaign included a music video of a song that warns people about the dangers of trains. The video was shown on YouTube, played on the radio, available to download on iTunes and posted across social networking sites. McCann Erickson made content for tumblr, instagram and soundcloud. They made a game that is available for download from application stores and created posters for characters featured in the video.
• The campaign was a huge success and used a clever advertising technique by attracting people’s attention without them realizing it was advertising.
• A hugely creative campaign which uses a catchy song that will stick in your head, bright colours, a name that attracts the audience’s attention and friendly cartoon characters.
• It was launched in Australia but has made its way worldwide.

2. Three Little Pigs – The Guardian – Bartle Bogle Hegarty

• A creative twist of a child’s tale turning it in to an adult news story.
• Award winning – CLIO award, AdWeek award, Cannes Lion recognized.
• A modern, interesting and intriguing advertisement.
• A great way of showing the Guardian as a modern, interactive, open-minded news organization.
• Effective use of social media within the advertisement.
• Using the Guardian name and logo throughout is a great way of the audience not forgetting who made the advertisement. Newspapers are not always easily recognisable in a crowd.
• Voiceover sounding as a news story on the television may attract the audience to watch the advertisement because they were not expecting that during an ad break. They may think the news has come on.

Unsuccessful Advertising Campaigns

1. Re-Civilize Yourself – Nivea – 

• This advertisement is a clearly example of advertising gone wrong. The message aimed at the audience was interpreted in a way that the creators did not expect, racist. The oppositional reading in the case of this advertisement has become the preferred reading by audiences. It would have been expected, with any campaign, that some people would have an opposed, negative view, however, in this case the negative view was the majority opinion.
• This has the lesson to be very careful about the wording and phrases used in campaigns.
• Nivea released a statement of apology and never used the advert again.
• The campaign did get a large amount of publicity but not in the way they would have wanted. Is bad publicity still good publicity?
• It’s not surprising that it is much more difficult to find the creators of this advertisement for Nivea.

2. Deserve to Die – Lung Cancer Alliance – Wisconsin

• This campaign shows how slogans should make sense without the small print. This advertisement had a great message behind it but the words ‘Cat Lovers Deserve to Die’, “Hipsters Deserve to Die’ and ‘The Tattooed Deserve to Die’ shocked the audience. The posters appeared mainly on bus stops where people do not have the time or find it hard to read the smaller print from a distance.
• It may have been in Wisconsin’s intentions to shock the audience to look at the adverts but it has caused a large amount of controversy.
• A key lesson to this campaign is how important design is; getting the perfect colours, readable text and font sizes correct.