December’s always the month we’re bombarded with ‘campaign of the year’ style content. At this agency, we’d never subject you to that. Never in a million years. We’re doing it in November instead.
We got together and discussed a whole range of creative campaigns and ended up with 10 amazing pieces of work that we’ve shamelessly packaged together in a sort of Top of the Pops style format. Ready to go?
10. Greggs rolls into Gregory and Gregory
What better place to start than with an institution that holds a special place in our (my) heart – Greggs. When the famous bakers fooled an unsuspecting crowd at a gourmet food festival under the cheeky guise of Gregory & Gregory, it was quite the talk of the office here.
9. Deezer plays to Gen Z tunes
A favourite of senior marketing manager, Kate Underwood – so much so she wrote about it last week – Timothy Armoo’s Gen Z campaign for Deezer enlisted a 16-year-old creator to make content that targeted their 13 to 17-year-old demographic. They created an AR lens for the brand that users could interact with on Snapchat and share their own videos. In just 24 hours the videos received 1.1 million views and 46,000 people had used the lens in their Snapchat stories. Not too shabby at all.
8. Getting Down Syndrome on the Endangered List
A hard-hitting campaign was selected by our lead designer, Scott Barker. An amazing campaign that takes an honest look at the conflicting questions that charity work can sometimes pose. Created by the guys at FCB Toronto, the campaign is a movement for people with Down Syndrome to be the first humans to be put on the Endangered List. To encourage signatures the campaign explores the challenges that people with Down Syndrome are affected by every day as well as some jaw-dropping statistics. ‘The best work I’ve seen in a while,’ said Scott.
7. Shiseido takes make-up advertising to another planet
Following a recent trip to Japan, our graphic designer, James Wills, has unsurprisingly plucked out a Japanese-themed gem. This is no ordinary ad for make-up and skin care, using some beautiful designs, impressive stop-motion animation, and an important step forward for LGBTQ in Japan. Watch this party bus ad from Shiseido and tell me it hasn’t blown your mind. I dare you!
6. Don’t be like Dave
A tad closer to home… Stourbridge to be frank. Project manager, James Johnston, was left scratching his head when he spotted this striking billboard on the Number 9 bus route passing McDonalds. When a customer didn’t pay his bills, a giant photo of him was printed on a billboard in a supposed bid to call him out on missed payments. James was surprised to see this… I can only imagine the shock Dave got. We’re still not sure who did this, but does it even really matter?
5. Merry DRAGmas from Lush
Front end developer, Vicki Cooper, was back in a flash to the call out for favourite creative campaigns of the year. For her, this recent Lush campaign in America caught her eye. She particularly liked the use of drag queens to showcase their Christmas products. ‘Quite a big move for the LGBT community state-side,’ said Vicki.
4. Brewdog trolls their rivals
We’ve kind of all been liking and talking about the re-emergence of ‘trash-talk’ in campaigns from 2018. Our favourite has to be Brewdog back on fine form, trolling it’s beer rival’s advertising slogans in this cheeky campaign. Another shout-out has to go to Pepsi Max, who call out Coke Zero with their ‘Too tasty to become a zero’ campaign. Pure mischief…and we love it.
3. League of Legends are K-Popping off to promote new in-game purchases
Hot off the press, our digital content marketing manager, Ryan Noble picked out a recent campaign for Riot Games’ League of Legends. They released a song to raise awareness of new in-game cosmetics for four different characters and to build awareness and anticipation around their 2018 e-sports World Championship. The song, which Ryan highly recommends listening to below, features four characters from the game in their new ‘skins’ and has gone completely viral. The song itself has seen 51m views on YouTube already and was only released 1 week ago.
2. Spotify surprise and delight with data-driven marketing
This amazing data-driven campaign from Spotify snuck by the skin of its teeth into our 2018 list. Launched back in January and it’s a campaign that we still talk about. The tone, the execution, and the practical use of data makes this close… very close… to being our winner.
IN AT NUMBER 1…
1. BBC Creative makes history with Russian tapestry illustration
The winner was unanimous. BBC Creative’s ‘History will be made’ campaign, coinciding with the World Cup in Russia, generated so much noise in the office it was impossible to contain. In fact, there was so much excitement about this campaign we simply had to get in touch with BBC Creative’s creative director, James Cross, to attend our staff conference in June as a guest speaker.
James kindly attended and gave us a true insight into the making of ‘History will be made’ and other incredible campaigns he and the team at BBC Creative have worked on. The campaign itself was a film that included over 600 unique embroided frames influenced by Russian tapestry, illustrating iconic moments from previous World Cups. We loved it. We hope you did, too.
At the very least we hope these campaigns have inspired you and provided some food for thought. Got some favourites of your own which should have made the list or feel like creating something special of your own?