5 Innovative Social Media Ad Campaigns

Advertising March 29, 2010 3 Comments

Online advertising is at the stage where we all know where the ads are and we pretty much know how to filter them out. Social media advertising is especially bad and traditionally suffers from very poor click through rates although it can be highly targeted when broken down in to specific demographics. The smart campaigns are trying to engage users with the ads, make users part of the story and trying to make something that really stands out in a world full of billions of boring ads. I wanted to select a few adverts here that are really doing something different and some of them are so good that they actually get media coverage for being such good ads which is when you really know that your ad is something people will share online…

Digg Inline Advertising

This is the second entry that features the site Digg and that must say something about the innovative ways in which they are working to find better solutions for their advertisers. For those of you not familiar with the site Digg it basically aggregates user submitted news stories on a home page that are then filtered by category. Getting on the homepage is a challenge for users and can drive great traffic and there was some uproar alast year when Digg integrated advertising in to the stream and ask users to start voting on the ads. What has happened though now that the ads have been accepted is that users actually engage with the adverts on a daily basis and vote them either up or down and as a result the brands are slotting right in to the middle of the most valuable real estate on the website without any outcry from users. Very smart indeed.

The YouTube Viral Video

I could have picked any one of hundreds of videos for this section of the post and the video itself is really not that important. What is important is that you now need to take the online world in to account when you create adverts that would normally have been for a TV audience only. It is no longer good enough to make something that just screams about your product and cost a couple of million to wow people in the short 30 seconds that you have. The new brief is to create something awe inspiring that will grab people’s attention and make people want to spread it to their Facebook profile, share on Twitter and email to their friends. There are hundreds of amazing videos I could have picked but this is my own favorite for it’s pure simplicity and the fun message it gets for the brand. The ad it so good that it has already reached a million people and another couple of thousand will be exposed to the Volkswagen brand after reading this post.

Guinness Virtual Pints On Facebook

Virtual gifts are something that are normally free on Facebook and although they do not normally take on the format of adverts one clever campaign by Guinness last year to mark the 250 celebration allowed users to give their friends a free pint of the black stuff which resulted in thousands of people around the world passing each other virtual pints of Guinness and displaying them on their profiles. for brands the ultimate goal is to have your products bought offline but if you can spend you time online passing around virtual versions of your product (in this case a pint  while displaying it on your Facebook profile them you are on to something when it comes time to the bar and order a real pint. The seed will in effect have been sewn.

Bing Advertises Within Farmville

Microsoft were incredibly smart when they ran an advert within the immensely popular Facebook social game Farmville. They were able to add 400,000 new fans to their Facebook fan page within a day as they offered free virtual cash to buy goods and services online in return for users becoming a fan. The key was the fact that the users never had to leave the game to become a fan and once Microsoft had captured those fans they were targeted with very specific updates which mentioned Farmville and sent them in the direction of search results related to that theme on the Bing search engine. There was no doubt a substantial cost to run these sorts of adverts but the returns and levels of engagement as a result of running them were immense and there for all to see in terms of fans.

Digg 404 Adverts

So these have only just arrived on the scene but they make great use of the 404 pages on Digg. For those of you not familiar with 404 pages they are pages that web users often end up on by mistake when they search for something they can’t find for example. They can be annoying but rather than leaving the pages as a wasted opportunity Digg and Burger King saw them as a great opportunity to have a little fun and left the following message which also corresponded with the video below. This is a great example of how the real estate of a page that would often be neglected and useless can be turned in to something of real value.

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