Six examples of brilliant marketing creative to enjoy with your coffee

Here on the Econsultancy blog, we're going to start teasing you with details of the week-long siren of excellence and japes that is the Festival of Marketing (8-10th October in London).

One of the many components of the Festival is PUNCH, the event where marketing meets the new creative. To quote our website, 'in today's increasingly saturated media landscape, creative power matters more than ever'.

So, to celebrate this event, and to give you something pretty to look at while you let your mind wander, I've listed some of my favourites in the world of creative in marketing.

Social

Tacobell

In the words of David, our intern, Taco Bell's Twitter account 'doesn't feed out generic, bland, and often repetitive info'.

Instead, those with the keys to the Taco Bell account engage in a mesmerising mix of humour and hyper engagement, crucially targeting a young demographic in a way that no other fast food joints have mastered.

Taco Bell engages with folks like 'Instagram 'Star' Acacia Brinley whose posts attract hundreds of people in a demographic where cheap food, quick-to-purchase ability, and a good metabolism are all part of an average day'.

These words are from our intern, David, who is bang in the middle of this demographic, has lived in New York, and earlier asked me if I knew who the Rizzle Kicks were(?).

Here, from the past few days, are two of the more anodyne replies from Taco Bell, but even these make me laugh, and are proof of constant engagement.

  

I'll let Buzzfeed show you just how good Taco Bell is when engaging with celebrities and playing the lark. Check out Taco Bell's feed and enable all tweets to show, and you'll see how active the account is when compared to [pick other fast food joint].

Guerrilla(esque)

Rockstar Games set my heart aflutter with this mural in New York, earlier this year.

Within an hour of the non-completed mural being tweeted, over a thousand visitors had travelled to see the box art.

As our intern, David, succinctly puts it 'murals are not a new thing, which is exactly why this is creative and fun – in a hipster world, looking for not-so-original, originality'.

It's old school, basically, and it blurs the line between the game and the reality, which is exactly what sandbox games are about. It fits perfectly with the product and can then be shared online.

 

Video

Lululemon is the biggest yoga-inspired retailer, selling clothes and accessories.

Their videos are great and fairly low-fi. Sh*t Yogis Say is a brilliant example of 'viral' content, having been viewed more than 2m times. Namaste. I love pigeons.

 

Lululemon got a decent amount of publicity for being one of the first brands to use Instagram video. Again, it's low fi and fun, but puts yoga incontrovertibly at the centre of the communication. 

Out of home

I have to include Google. OK, this is classic out-of-home advertising, old school marketing if you will, but I think we can agree that when it's done well, it's unbeatable when it comes to 'brand tingly feeling'.

These ads, seen last year on London Underground platforms, are brilliant. They remain both out of the ordinary and commonplace, with the phonetic spellings redefining both where you are standing (on your previously oh-so familiar commute) and the product you use likely every day.

Granted, you can't search underground without having access to the TFL WiFi, but this is predominantly an awareness campaign, and not about acting right now.

 

Cross device

Dulce Vida Spirits

Yes, that's right, organic tequila has made it into this blog post. After all is said I done, I do live in ultra hip East London, which is coincidentally where the Festival of Marketing will be taking place.

Dulce Vida has a responsive website that looks, frankly, beautiful, and terrifying in its capacity to encourage tequila purchasing both from desktop and mobile.

To be honest, the website does have some glitches, and links to other US liquor retailers instead of selling directly, but it's still beautiful, and includes nicely formatted info on process, sustainability and cocktail recipes.

Check out Starbucks for a big hitting version of a beautiful responsive website.

  

Immersive

HTML 5

Here are the two ends of the HTML 5 spectrum. From last year's incredible storytelling and publishing for Brandon Generator (ok, not strictly marketing unless you look at it from the perspective of Interet Explorer, who designed the work for IE9), to a Solar Panel website, that attempts to stand out from the hegemony of static service company websites. 

As HTML5 is used more, the challenge of making immersive experiences for the good of  user, and not just to show off, will be taken up by more and more marketers and web designers. Currys' great responsive website has HTML 5 elements within it, and is worth taking a look at to see the near future of responsive and immersive websites.

 

Disclosure: we have a brilliant new intern, David Olshanetsky (name of a ballet dancer, mind of an entrepreneur) who has compiled much of this list. If you want to give him some love, you can find him on Twitter. 

Econsultancy's Punch event is where 'Marketing meets Creative in the age of data and insight'. Curated by Creative Review, this event showcases the best of insight-driven creative. This event forms part of our week-long Festival of Marketing extravaganza.