Marketers’ marketing: the best ad campaigns of 2013
What were the best ads of 2013? Trawl through the industry end-of-year awards lists and there are some common themes.
Predictably, animals featured prominently, from the Budweiser Clydesdale to the GoPro kitten. Dancing ponies? Disco chickens? Humping camels? Check, check and check.
Star power also proved attractive for many brands, with celebrities appearing front and centre in many of the year’s most popular spots. Want to see David Beckham in his smalls? There’s an ad for that. How about Nascar’s Jeff Gordon terrify a car dealer on a test drive? You got it. Megan Fox blowing up Las Vegas? Yes please. Jean Claude Van Damme doing the splits whilst balancing between two trucks reversing at speed? Now you’re getting ridiculous – but here you go.
More than anything else, 2013 was the year advertising creatives perfected the art of tugging on our heartstrings. From the Guinness ad that took bromance to a whole new level, to the Robinson’s drink spot eulogising father-son relationships, to the adoptee using Google Maps to find his birth mother, to the surprise Super Bowl hit from Chrysler celebrating the American farmer in all of us – ads in 2013 played the tearjerker card like never before. And that’s before we even start on the slew of seasonal offerings that poured extra sugar on an already saccharine-sweet format.
Of course, as consumers we all have our personal favourites – Kmart’s ‘Ship My Pants’ was something of an office favourite this year. But in search of a more considered (read less childish) opinion, I caught up with some of the leading lights in the marketing industry to discover which campaigns peaked their interest last year – and more importantly, why they were so successful.
Their answers were illuminating. Because what stood out most was that the year’s most successful ads were the ones that embraced a multi-faceted approach, harnessing the power of paid, owned and earned media across multiple channels, from TV to online, social to print. Clearly having great content is only part of the equation: just as important is the seeding and amplification strategy, and how you generate and sustain campaign momentum.
As creative industry legend Dave Trott told me (in an interview being featured on the site later this month), the Holy Grail for advertisers is to “enter the language” – to become part of popular culture and stand out from what he calls the wallpaper of marketing messages we are bombarded with on a daily basis. For Trott, it’s about thinking creatively about how to use the tools at our disposal, in order to “get upstream of the problem”.
The emergence of new technologies and channels offers marketers a great opportunity to do more with their campaigns and get creative about how they stand out – provided they use them correctly. So how did brands like Marmite, Lego, Dove, Mercedes and the British Heart Foundation get it right this year? Watch the video to find out.
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As a journalist, editor and now presenter at MeetTheBoss TV, Ben has been writing and speaking about the intersection between business, people and technology for the past 15 years. In a career that’s taken him from working for consumer music and style mags to Editor-in-Chief of Business Management magazine – via work for the likes of The Guardian, Frost & Sullivan and Bloomberg, amongst others – he’s interviewed some of the biggest names in business, spoken at international events and moderated countless roundtable discussions.