Heads Up: You had to be there… or did you?
This week we are exploring out-of-home marketing but not in the traditional sense. OOH marketing usually refers to billboards, bus stop posters, anything we see ‘on the go’.
It initially appears that this campaign is OOH, somewhere in central London, however, the ad is an entirely digital creation.
The Brief: Cosmetic brand Maybelline were looking to advertise their ‘Sky High Mascara’ brand.
Makeup ads are notoriously overly edited, often with disclaimers that the models aren't actually wearing the product advertised (which is madness surely…) - but this campaign took over-editing to the next level.
The Campaign: The video shows a huge (sky high) mascara brush applying the product to a tube train and a bus that are adorned with larger-than-life lashes. The low-fi video is made to look like a recording from a passerby’s phone.
» Watch the video: Tiktok | Facebook | Youtube «
Stats: This Maybelline campaign followed the success of a similar stunt in New York which also went viral. The video gained 46.4 million views on Instagram alone with over 2 million likes.
‘Mock-ups’ like this are becoming more and more popular where brands decide to generate ‘fake’ versions of campaigns which often generate just as many likes, reposts and even press headlines as the real, time, cost and resource intensive campaign would.
Often viewers don’t stay with the content long enough to realise it’s not real in the few seconds of viewing on tiktok - and does that even matter? It’s the creative idea that is capturing us here, making us want to share it with friends, whether it is real or not.
Why does it stand out?
➡ ️It’s an innovative idea that consumers won’t have seen before
➡ There is a clear sense of humour and playfulness in the movement of the lashes and brush on impact
➡ ️It is striking enough that you will remember the brand and name
I wonder if we are utilising all that digital marketing and AI technology has to offer when it comes to sharing our message to the masses? If these creative ‘mock-up’ ideas are generating significant attention, is this a cheap and clever strategy to utilise?
In our work, we might stage an in-person protest and it is not only the people that see our campaign in the moment but what we do with that content (pictures of the event normally) that have the biggest potential e.g. online sharing or press. So, if the true impact is going to come after the fact, does the thing itself need to have happened or can we too fake it?
I love out-of-home marketing and think that it is under-utilised in our work so I hope that this won’t detract from considering real OOH marketing as a viable and important movement building option but rather to get you thinking about experimenting and testing this hybrid version.
Heads Up Challenge: Think of the endless possibilities
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
Identify a brief for your own work. Write down three fake creative ideas that you could try out digitally and why not enter these prompts into an image generator?
Brief:
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Set aside a weekly 15 minute slot to complete these weekly creative tasks and why not schedule a call with others on your team to talk through your thoughts on this topic and share ideas for you to try out?
Heads Up is a weekly creative digest that encourages animal advocates to take inspiration from case studies of creative campaign tactics outside of our movement.
> ~ 5 minutes read-time (but hopefully gets you thinking for longer than that)
> Demonstrates interesting tactics and use of biases that you can test
> Contains a creative challenge for you to explore independently or with your team with results that you can apply for your important campaigning work
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Need some support to implement more creative campaigns? userfriendly.org.uk