Number 8

Kraft’s Jello iphone/ipad app  (PER)

It’s certainly not easy to make a 100 year old food product made from animals’ bones, sugar water and artificial coloring relevant to a new audience, but that’s exactly what Kraft did for their gelatin dessert known as Jello.  Rather than highlight its healthful qualities in these days of promoting water as calorie free—Jello has no fat--the campaign focused on its fun factor by creating a free mobile app that’s pure joy. Users select their favorite flavor and then choose any song from your iTunes library, and then watch your favorite Jello dance in time to the music. They even suggest choosing different genres, from Punk to BlueGrass, to watch the Jello groove out. Try it, you'll like it. 

KLM Surprise  (PER, RWA, LBS)

I love KLM even though I've never flown the airline.  And I'm not alone. They have over 600K fans on Facebook, Virgin America under 200K. Here's one great reason why. They not only understand their customers, they appreciate them. Everyone knows that waiting in airports before boarding your plane is unbelievably boring, but KLM thought of a way to change that. Using Foursquare and Twitter to locate KLM  passengers who had checked in at the airport, they surprised them with a personalized gift as a thank you for flying their airline.  

A little surprise goes a long way and the smiles on the faces of the recipients tells one part of the  story, and 1MM impressions on Twitter tells the other side too. Decidedly a brilliant use of all three themes. 

It’s that time of year again. 

Everyone is creating their Top Ten list and it is likely they will have the same viral videos or digital marketing campaigns, e.g., Darth Vader Volkswagen ad, on them.  However, I have assembled a different list, one that is not based on number of views or shares. This is a highly personal list, but very strictly curated.

 The three criteria every campaign had to meet were:

1. Unique - the message was conveyed in a fresh, and unconventional manner..not a rehash of an older campaign
2. Compelling - brands are becoming content creators, so the execution had to be engaging, either in a fun and amusing way, or a serious, but not depressing, fashion
3. Effective -  the message had to be on brand and successful in reaching the intended audience.

While I assembled the list, three key themes emerged from the winners: Personalization (PER), Real World Activation or Trans Media (RWA) and Localization integration (LBS). And as you'll see below, I've indicated how the winning campaigns integrated those themes into their execution. 

I'll be posting two campaigns a day from the list for the next five days. So here we go in descending order. Hopefully you'll find some unexpected gems here.

 Number 10

Moby’s Album Launch for Destroyed (PER RWP LBS) 

These days just launching an album and hoping it will sell is a long gone assumption. Streaming it for free and hoping some folks will pay for it has been around since Radiohead released In Rainbows.  So when Moby launched Destroyed in May, he chose to use the newest and coolest technologies to reach his fans.  By leveraging the streaming functionality through SoundCloud to let fans hear the music, and the sharing functionality of the hugely popular iPhone app, Instagram, the launch became a real time interactive immersive experience. The website provides the RWA and LBS factors through a world map dotted with the photographs taken by Moby that inspired the songs while on tour.  Then adding in the PER, he asked fans to contribute their own Instagram photos to the site, allowing a more personal connection with Moby and his process.  The site has 18K Likes and 3500 tweets, not bad!

 Number 9

Granata Pet Snack Check (RWA, LBS)   

Interactive billboards are not new but using them as Granata has done is brilliant. The objective was to make dog owners aware of their new healthy of dog food.  But their unique strategy was not to target the owners, but rather the dogs. Knowing dogs need to be walked daily, they put up a series of billboards that incented owners to check into them on Foursquare (LBS) as they were walking past with their dogs, which immediately dispensed free dog food (RWA). What dog doesn’t want food? What owner wouldn’t mind free food? Best of all, Granata gets dogs to taste their food without doing the hard sell. Everybody wins.

http://bit.ly/6vM5gs

http://reflectionof.me/its-all-about-the-ice-cream