Read on to find out which creative and comical campaigns made our top five…

Samsung

Samsung Electronics Australia launched their brand new virtual reality headset, the Samsung Gear VR (which happens to be powered by the Samsung Galaxy Note 4), in spectacular fashion recently by setting up a diving shop in the middle of the desert and inviting customers to swim with sharks.

The shark dive was recreated for curious customers based in Alice Springs, Central Australia, by kitting them out with a headset, which allowed them to experience what it would be like to be underwater with the dangerous fish.

It’s seriously impressive to see the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 being used to power such a cool gadget in a campaign like this one and the customers’ reactions to their deep-sea adventure are priceless.

Domino’s Tummy Translator

Choosing which kind of pizza you want can be a difficult decision, so in an attempt to assist you in this time of desperate need, Domino’s has created a Tummy Translator app that promises to translate your belly grumbles into a personalised pizza recommendation. Yum!

The app works by users holding a phone against their rumbling tums in order for the ‘Gastro-Acoustic-Enterology’ to decode their vibrations. A special pizza option is then offered, combining an array of toppings that may not usually be on the original menu and depending on whether the user is ‘Peckish’, Hungry’, Nibbly’ or ‘Famished’.

Domino’s has really hit the nail on the head with this one by tapping into the needs (and wildest dreams!) of its customers in a fun and innovative way.

Topshop at London Fashion Week

Always eager to stay one step ahead of the crowd, Topshop took over London Fashion Week (#LFW) over the last few days by spotting key emerging trends from the fashion industry and advertising their own products which fit the trend on massive digital billboards near six of their stores.

The retail giant identified stand-out trends that the fashion elite were tweeting about online and then used these tweets to market their own merchandise to style conscious shoppers in the capital. Customers who tweeted @Topshop directly with a specific trend hashtag also received a tweet with a special selection of styles that were available to buy straightaway.

Once again, Topshop proved itself to be on the ball with this campaign, combining the excitement of #LFW with the ease and popularity of online shopping.

Moone Boy

Londoners were left stunned this week when they were asked to take a picture of a man and his invisible friend, Mike. This hilarious prank was set up by Sky 1 and its award-winning Irish sitcom, Moone Boy, in which actor Chris O’Dowd plays the imaginary BFF of 12-year-old Martin Moone.

In the campaign footage we watch as the unknown man hands a polaroid camera over to unsuspecting Londoners, asking them to take a quick snap of he and his invisible pal in front of famous London landmarks. The various photographers are then left in complete shock as the picture is immediately processed in front of them to reveal the man stood next to a real version of Mike. Trust us, this is one you need to watch!

The Branded3 team were all in total agreement that this is a great example of super simple and effective TV promo.

Mastercard

Mastercard truly “mastered” the art of making a heart-warming ad campaign recently in celebration of their Champions League sponsorship by hi-jacking a regular game of 5-aside football and turning it into a spectacle not too different from the biggest matches in the league.

As a group of Turkish players kicked off at their local AstroTurf, the Mastercard crew stepped in and brought out adorable mascots and a cheering crowd to make the teams feel like true football stars. And to make their game extra special, legendary referee Pierluigi Collina was even invited to officiate the game. Imagine that!

The only downside here is that the video doesn’t appear to have received as many views (yet) as we think it deserves. However, since the campaign has not been angled towards one specific Champions League match, it has the potential to become an evergreen ad.

Which campaign was your favourite this week? Let us know if we missed any out!

Stephen explained that businesses can benefit from greater search visibility and more conversions by being comprehensive and thinking about the intention of the searcher.

Stephen demonstrated that by understanding what your audience is actually searching for and the questions they’re asking, you can ensure your site answers those questions and stops the user returning to search.

If you missed today’s event, you can check out Stephen’s slides below and catch him at Brighton SEO in April.

Burberry & Line- London Fashion Week

Innovative luxury brand Burberry have teamed up with instant communications application Line to celebrate the London Fashion Week. Burberry will be streaming their Autumn/Winter 2015 show via Line live to Tokyo, where the application is hugely popular. The application is known for featuring stickers of celebrities and emoji-style characters. Line currently has more than 600 Million active users worldwide.

The promotion video features the newly released characters of model and Burberry brand ambassador Cara Delevingne, Christopher Bailey, Mario Testino and Anna Wintour. The video also shows Line’s very own quirky Cony the rabbit and Brown the bear exploring London and attending the Burberry show at London Fashion Week.

Obama & Buzzfeed – Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About

This week Buzzfeed and the US President Obama have come together for a campaign to raise awareness for the US health insurance application deadline. Buzzfeed have created a video showing everyday activities that we all engage in, but never talk about featuring Barack Obama with a selfie stick and fumbling his speech in the mirror. A very simple, effective and fun way to remind people to apply for health insurance in time of the deadline.

EastEnders – Mind the Danny

Popular London-based soap EastEnders created a campaign to celebrate their 30 year anniversary this week. On Wednesday tube travellers of the London Underground were surprised with a very special treat on their journey as EastEnders’ Danny took over announcements at Bromley-by-Bow station swapping the traditional “Mind the gap” for “there is a good service running on all London Underground Lines…Bang On…Proper…”. The campaign was covered in the Radio Times, OK and Digital Spy and even Danny said he enjoyed the experience.

Disney – Student Filmmaking Campaign

Shoppers at a New York mall were quite surprised this week when their shadows turned into Disney characters mimicking their moves. Disney created the stunt in order to support the launch of their recently created campaign Disney Side – a project which encourages young people to make their own films. The stunt is perfect to attract people’s attention and raise awareness for Disney’s newly launched Disney Side campaign.

Samsung – Pancake Day

Samsung have put a smile on their follower’s faces on Pancake Day, they asked their followers to send in a picture of themselves and in return Samsung posted an image of a pancake in the shape of their followers face.

Remember to let us know in the comments if we’ve missed any of your favourite campaigns this week!

The talk demonstrated what content should look like when rankings and shares are the by-product of creative that drives business value. You can download Stephen’s write-up of his talk by using the form below, it includes an example of a piece of content we created for cosmetic surgery client, Transform:

With his forward-thinking content marketing insights, Stephen is a regular contributor to the Search Engine Watch blog and is regularly invited to speak on the subject at digital marketing events around the world. You can catch him at Brighton SEO in April and plenty of other events, check out our events list here.

If you missed Stephen at the Figaro Digital seminar today, you can see his presentation slides below:

Laura was asked about best practices to master media relations and how best to approach blogger outreach. Referencing tools such as Gorkana and FollowerWonk, Laura gave advice on how to drive campaign success through seeding of content and social promotion.

The interview comes before Laura’s expert workshop at Brighton SEO – one of the biggest search marketing conferences in the UK.

Laura’s workshop on 9^th April at Brighton Dome will focus on advanced link building and blogger outreach, listen to the podcast above and sign up to Laura’s workshop if you want to learn more.

‘Sitecore offers a suite that includes a WCM backbone, integrated with marketing software, analytics, and social media integration, and even a commerce server.

The report is based on a number of core criteria including cloud, mobile, marketing and commerce with the latter two elements being key differentiators for Sitecore. Although they are all different, it’s great to see that all of the vendors have a similar vision in providing a complete marketing platform that is focused on the customer experience.

The report gives a background to the process they carried out and gives some insight into the way WCMS’s are evolving to meet the demands of consumers and more digitally experienced marketers and administrators.

All of the platforms are now delivering the standard ability to create and manage content quicker and easier than in the past with as little technical knowledge as possible, but some of the more advanced features that are becoming higher in demand and driving the visionary aspects include:

• Optimisation: the ability to measure, test, analyse and evolve the effectiveness of your site content
• Marketing automation: integrating with email, SMS and other content delivery mechanisms to send targeted messaging
• Personalisation: the ability to segment and personalise the experience based on visitor data
• Multichannel integration: the ability to control your content thorugh a single platform but distribute via multi-channel such as social or mobile
• Commerce: the integration of transaction processes, catalogues and product workflows

The report outlines the usual competitor vendors Acquia (Drupal) in the next band down in strong performers and EPiServer slightly lower in the contenders band. They are both great platforms in their own right but I do lean towards Sitecore for the vision and direction the company has for the experience platform.

You can download a copy of the report direct from the Sitecore website: The Forrester Wave: Web CMS, Q1 2015

With this in mind, our Comms team have compiled their favourite PR and social campaigns of the week (caution, the following article may contain a dose of romance):

Spongebob Squarepants film release

Marking the launch of Spongebob Squarepants the movie, the little yellow character from Bikini Bottom has spoofed some cult movie posters and the results are fantastic!

This PR stunt has sent the internet and social media into a frenzy and has seen coverage appear across national titles and influential social accounts.

One of the spoofed posters even sees Spongebob transform into Christian Grey himself.

Tesco Valentine’s cards

Tesco is definitely feeling the love this week and this has been mirrored across its social channels.

Earlier this week, Tesco shared a number of tongue-in-cheek valentine’s cards with their social following and this received a great reaction.

Playing up on the comical aspect of its FMCG offering and the romance of Valentine ’s Day, the cards have resulted in a social media storm with the cards also being shared in online publications and press.

Scope end the awkward

Scope, a national UK charity who aim to provide support for people with disabilities, has raised the bar this week with their End the Awkward Campaign.

Playing again on the romance of Valentine’s Day, Scope has created numerous valentine’s cards helping to spread the message of their cause.

These cards have also been complemented by data and video content highlighting attitudes towards disabled people.

This campaign has been excellently executed and has seen coverage online and over social channels helping to raise awareness for a wonderful cause.

Ford gives blind dates the ride of their lives

During the Valentine’s period, Ford took speed dating to a whole new level. As a covert video campaign, Ford hired a professional female stunt driver to go on a number of blind dates, trick a man by offering them a lift home, and play “dumb blonde”.

As she offers her blind date a lift (in a 2015 Mustang), the female stunt driver pretends to stall and acts like she is a bad driver. As the men start to worry about their own safety, she hits the accelerator at 120mph and shows the men that women can drive.

Their reactions and expressions were caught on video which resulted in over 60 sites picking this campaign up including nationals Daily Mail and Telegraph too.

The article on the Daily Mail alone achieved over 14k shares and Ford cars were being talked about across the web during the run up to Valentines.

Now for a campaign showing a little less romance:

Game of Thrones ‘Winter is Coming’

Game of Thrones has become an international success and arguably a cult series over the last few years, and there is no wonder when they perform influential stunts such as the following:

Game of Thrones S4 encased in a block of ice, delivered by a White Walker in a FedEx uniform. Defrosts Monday. pic.twitter.com/cQco3PQWKM

— Empire Magazine (@empiremagazine) February 12, 2015

 

To celebrate the release of series 4 ‘Winter is Coming’ the clever guys at Game of Thrones sent a DVD encased in ice to influential film magazine Empire.
With the ice set to melt by Monday, it means that guys at Empire will have to wait a few more days before they can get their hands on the DVD. However, a nice little tweet to their 322k followers means that Game of Thrones surely achieved what they set out to gain with this social stunt.

Sitecore is a complete personalisation and experience platform and when used correctly, can increase conversions, reduce the return to SERPs and improve search visibility.

We’re a Sitecore Gold Certified Solutions partner and we’ve seen first-hand the business benefits that correct implementation of the Sitecore platform can bring. For the Inchcape Toyota site we designed and developed for example, it saw a five-fold increase in search visibility soon after launch.

We’ve put together some information on which specific features of Sitecore brands should be using to create the ultimate customer experience.

Fill in the form below to download the key benefits of maximising your Sitecore platform and please feel free to get in touch if you’d like a complimentary workshop with Branded3 and the Sitecore team, designed to help you reach the full potential of your customer-focused platform.

LIDL launches budget lingerie line with a twist

Supermarket chain LIDL launched its first lingerie range this week with an amusing Valentine’s Day prank that has gone viral.

The video shows some unsuspecting male shoppers being approached by an attractive woman asking for directions. They’re then given a shock when she reveals her skimpy lingerie beneath her coat and their girlfriends (who are in on the act) turn up.

This PR stunt has been a huge success for the retailer gaining them mass online coverage from national publications as well as becoming a trending topic on social media. This easy to make video prank has proved to be a great way to not only get people talking about their new range but to also show it off.

Starbucks and Match.com – #Starbucksdate

Starbucks and Match.com have teamed up to host the world’s largest Starbucks Date ahead of Valentine’s Day. The online dating app will feature a button called ‘Meet at Starbucks’ which will allow users to meet up at their nearest branch for a coffee date.

This campaign is the perfect example of how two brands can collaborate successfully together. Thus far, the campaign has sparked widespread discussion on social media and will no doubt gain mass coverage when the actual event takes place.

Heineken US – #DateInABox

Dutch Brewers, Heineken threw a great ‘surprise and delight’ style Valentine’s Day campaign last year where they allowed Twitter users to tweet them using the hashtag ‘#DateInABox’ in order to request a free date for you and your significant other. They threw in a catch though, stating that in order to get the code to unlock the date from vault the male in the relationship had to publicly share a picture of #DateInABox on Instagram.

They devised this creative social media campaign based on a survey they’d carried out which revealed that men are less likely to declare their love on social media than women.

McDonalds – Pay With Lovin’

McDonalds has launched a new campaign inspired by love and acts of kindness. The fast food giant is offering customers the option to pay for their meals between now and Valentine’s Day with ‘Random Acts of Lovin’. They put together a short advert which they unveiled during the Superbowl this week.

Hasbro – Monopoly turns 80

To celebrate Monopoly’s 80^th anniversary, 30,000 of the board games sold in France will contain real cash. This campaign is particularly great since this twist of the special edition of the game will no doubt drive sales and gain a lot of media attention.

Sky Atlantic – Polar Bear Takes in London’s Sites

Marking the launch of Sky Atlantic’s hotly anticipated arctic drama ‘Fortitude’, Sky Atlantic have unleashed an 8 ft. long, fully animated adult polar bear into the streets of London.

This PR stunt has been highly popular on social media with many sending in images and videos of their morning experience bumping into a large polar bear. The highly sophisticated prop uses internal monitors linked to hidden cameras, allowing the two performers inside to see and control its movement.

Based on the idea that polar bears are the most dangerous animal on land and present threat to inhabitants, Sky Atlantic wanted to give people an up close experience of what it must be like to come face to face with one of the biggest stars in their new show Fortitude.

See full gallery here: http://news.sky.com/gallery/1415909/polar-bear-takes-in-londons-sights

Marc Jacobs – #CastMeMark

Marc by Marc Jacobs’s latest campaign titled #CastMeMark is based around their new spring 2015 collection. Mark by Mark Jacobs gave their fans the opportunity to model and showcase their new collection by creating a photo sharing social media competition.

Users were asked to take and share a photo of themselves, posing for the camera along with the hashtag #CastMeMark for the opportunity to be one of the 11 recruited models. They took to Facebook and Instagram where over 100,000 photos were shared to recruit 11 fans to model in their ads.

This was a great campaign performed by this brand as it added personalisation to their campaign and allowed fans and the general public to be a part of it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2911956/Move-models-Marc-Marc-Jacobs-turns-social-media-cast-11-fashion-fans-spring-2015-campaign.html#v-3990926834001

Cervical Cancer- #SmearforSmear

Charity selfie campaigns have been a big hit in 2014, including the #nomakeupselfie and selfie-inspired ice Bucket Challenge. However, they appear to be continuing in 2015 also after Jo’s Cervical Cancer trust kickstarted their latest campaign #SmearforSmear. According to research, Smear tests (cervical screening) save 5,000 lives a year, however one in five women are known to not take up their invitation to have one. For young women aged 25-29 this rises to one in three.

The #SmearforSmear campaign aims to remind people of the importance of smear test by asking women to share their lipstick smeared selfie and then nominating a friend to do the same. Each participator are asked to donate money to the charity to help the cause.

Thousands of people across the world are taking part in this on social including celebrities too. On Jo’s cervical cancer trust website, a tool pulls in every selfie using the hashtag creating a sort of montage selfie campaign page for users to view. This is a great way to get people involved, see their selfies online and make feel really part of this campaign and valued for their actions.

http://www.jostrust.org.uk/smearforsmear/

Pearlfisher – Jump In

Design agency Pearlfisher created a charity-led stunt to promote itself by creating a ball pit for grownups. The pit, named Jump In, contains 80,000 pearl white balls, and is known to hold up to 30 big kids at a time. For every person that jumps in, Pearlfisher will donate £1 to the charity ‘right to play’. The ball pit is located in the company’s gallery in Hammersmith, London and is open Monday to Friday 10am-5pm until 13th February.

This is a great way to promote the agency itself and raise money for charity at the same time.

http://bcove.me/adbedvou

Anti-Domestic Violence Campaign – Slap Her

A heart-warming video campaign has gone viral across the web showing touching reactions of boys who are asked to slap a girl in the street. An Italian video journalist conducted a social experiment with the aims of highlight the issue of violence by men against women.

Several boys aged between six and eleven are interviewed on a busy street and videoed their reactions. After asking them numerous questions and being introduced to a girl similar to their age, the journalist asks the boys to hit her to test their reactions.

This three minute clip proves that older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser and aims to put an end to domestic violence.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2897207/Why-not-m-man-Tearjerker-video-shows-touching-reactions-boys-asked-slap-girl-street.html#v-3971513484001

Are there any other campaigns we have missed out on? What are your favourite ones so far in 2015?