Cool Marketing Thoughts

One of the leading car rental companies in Europe is Sixt. In Germany or Switzerland, and more recently at Schiphol airport in The Netherlands as well, I saw their brand gain traction and become more present. They always find cool ways to do offline marketing stunts, as I have previously covered a few times [hanging car, don’t forget]. But also in the online market, they have found ways to be remarkable when they experimented with a new way to make their Google Adwords ads stand out from the crowd.

Pretty clever.

Thanks for the pointer, Paul.

Fuel Industries, an agency specializing in branded entertainment, was hired by QNX Software Systems to help out with the launch of a product directed to a very specific community (embedded software developers). So Fuel Industries came up with something a little different and developed a Flash game called The Pocket Geek to get the Foundry27 forum some more tracking.

Besides the fact the design looks really neat, I’m very fond of the ‘action-figure’ approach. It’s makes a geek-in-the-box look so adorable and cute, I think this could be a super cool direct marketing gadget to send out to agencies. Collect ‘em all, and rule the world!

The gameplay is nice, goes smooth but is a little more complicated than you might suspect at first glance. Keeping a geek productive, not hungry and happy at the same time requires tact. The IQ tests in between are funny :) The goal is to have your project finished by the end of the week. Challenging. Perfect for a Friday afternoon.

Extra stuff:

QNX homepage
Foundry27 - Learn more about QNX and for code, tips and binaries
Everyday QNX - 25 Ways that QNX Touches Your Life
Pocket Geek Forum - Discuss Pocket Geek on the Foundry27 forums.
QNX’s Wikipedia Page

Thanks for the pointer, Nick Iannitti.

Houtlust recently merged its content to Osocio.org, so you might want to adjust your bookmarks if you haven’t done so already. I was browsing the site and stumbled upon this pretty interesting ad. Sure, it’s not the first one to be depicted on the wall of a swimming pool under the water level, but I thought it was an interesting take on global warming. Even though I do not think things will take such a dramatic turn, there is still a need to alert people of the dangers if we keep up with our current wasteful lifestyle. This is a pretty cool way to communicate, and most of all I think it’s pretty wow. I’d take a few extra dives just to look at the ad better :-)

Caption: “Don’t let this be our future. Save our rainforest, stop global warming.”

Agency: Naga DDB, Malaysia

Paul Hennell pointed me to a very interesting piece of hilarious marketing. It’s a bit like selling the holes in the cheese, but in this case it’s free. What a very cunning plan to put this up. A Scottish rock radio station based in Glasgow decided to hand out free air guitars as a promotional stunt for their launch. In front of their building an empty guitar stand invited people to pick a free instrument. As Paul hinted, this might be a super cool idea for a guitar store when you’d add: ‘more colors available inside’. This is just brilliant!

Thanks for the pointer, Paul!

A little while ago, a new club opened near my town. For their opening they asked an agency in Antwerp to come up with a nice idea. So, since the club was named ‘Burn’, what better way to be remarkable than to set the flyer-boy on fire while he was handing out the flyers? Using a ‘consumer generated’ quality of film, they taped it and sent it out on the web, where apparently some people thought it was real. Discussions in the comments of the site where the clip was leaked show however that not everybody was happy about the fact ‘their’ site was being used to drop a viral. Thing is, you’ll never be able to please everybody. I don’t see this as an abuse of a site, I see this as a nice way to promote a stunt.

Besides the discussion of the fact that virals still make a chance out there, I still think this is pretty cool. If they pull off the stunt a few times in a more crowded area, I’m sure it will lead to the needed word of mouth advertising scenarios. This is, and remains, something you do not see every day, and so it’s good enough to grab the attention of the people who see this happen. They will beyond any doubt accept the flyer and read it. They might not hold on to it, but they’ll read the message. And in a world where you have to deal with an overload of boring advertisements and commercials, standing out of the crowd is the first issue to work on. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

Agency: DuboisMeetsFugger
Made by Wendy Wauters & Karl Magnus
Filmed by Toon Mertens

Living up to its brand promise, Axe came out with a tasty new commercial a little while ago. Unlike the ‘we make a nerd be loved by gorgeous women’ approach, they now offer you the real deal. Using their deodorant, you will be changed into a yummy chocolate man and all women will want to have a piece of you. I think I’m going to move to the US, buy the deodorant and then sue Axe for not living up to its promises. Hah!

Video: Axe Chocolate
Thanks for the clip, Arns

If you thought you’ve experienced it all and advertisement could no longer shock/bother/make you think anymore (pick one), then here is quite the eye-opener for you. To protest against whale hunting, a poster of a whale has been hung against a wall, the whale is sliced open so that its guts come out (apparently a normal procedure), and below the poster on the floor are… some remains of intestins. I hope this ad ran in well-ventilated areas only, and I also hope that there was no restaurant nearby. These concerns put aside, this thing comes smashing in your face like a fly on a bicycle ride. And if you have my kinda luck and the fly happens to be right there when you’re talking and flies right in your throat, the effect would most likely be the same.

Done for IFAW, the international fund for animal welfare.

Agency: Republic of Everyone/Happy Soldiers, Sydney, Australia
Creative Director / Art Director / Copywriter: Happy Soldiers
Photographer: Adrian Lander
Retoucher: Electric Art
Released: December 2007
Via: AdsOfTheWorld

Arns just sent in a funny commercial I just had to post. Might be a bit older already, seeing that it’s from a beer brand from down under, and it sometimes takes a while for those campaigns to reach this part of the world. Nevertheless, I thought it was pretty cool to see a beer brand sponsor a philharmonic orchestra on the one hand AND supply all of their instruments on the other. Must have taken aaaaages to set this all straight to the right tones and to tune the contents of the bottles to create a synchronical melody out of it with such a group of people. Nice job!

Video:Victoria Bitter

In case you didn’t know: Australia’s favourite full strength beer, Victoria Bitter or VB as it’s fondly known, has a tradition of rewarding hard work and hard play, dating back to the 1890s. More info on their beersite.