Busy weekday. Rush hour. You are hurrying to work. Suddenly, you spot a man in business formals paragliding over the city’s busiest streets! Catches your attention?
That’s what Red Bull wanted to do with its publicity campaign in Buenos Aires. It had a man in business attire circle the city’s streets. Why? Well, ‘Red Bull Gives You Wings’.
Similarly, Deutsche Telekom took its T-Mobile brand to Barcelona with a live game of Angry Birds. Users could hurl real-looking angry birds to hit pigs at one of the city’s squares. Creates great recall and makes perfect advertising sense if your brand goes by the line, ‘Life’s for sharing’.
Advertisers and brand owners are increasingly taking brand engagement ideas to the real world, instead of confining them to print campaigns and digital media ads. While some brands are taking the safe route with sampling campaigns, meet-the-celebrity-programmes, and contests, other brands are exploring more daring ideas.
Back home in India, recently, the then soon-to-hit-theatres movie, ‘Thank You’ found a novel way of becoming the talk of the town. The makers of the film, UTV Motion Pictures, added to Mumbai’s roads a bus for couples called, ‘Pyaar do, pyaar lo’, after one of its more popular songs. Though the name sounds corny, the reasoning behind it isn’t. In a city hard-pressed for space, couples yearn for privacy. They can get some on this bus. Its interiors are divided into compartments and couples can spend some ‘alone time’ there.
It’s real people in real life. Why should brand engagement be limited to the virtual space?
