In 2016, brands and agencies upped their game, embraced the newest tech and took chances on risky ideas to deliver some of the most innovative, engaging and viral campaigns of the year.
5 Game-Changing Experiential Campaigns From 2016
12/07/2016
1. Ted Baker: Mission Impeccable
Dapper clothing brand Ted Baker launched a three minute short film last September to promote their winter/autumn collection. What made the video unique was that everything in the film was fully shoppable! If you saw an item of clothing in the video that you liked the look of, you could just click on it and purchase.
The mini-movie was created by London film collective Crowns & Owls and executive produced by Guy Ritchie (Snatch) for some added star power.
Ted Baker successfully brought the worlds of film-making and experiential marketing together and the shoppable video garnered nearly 7 million views on Youtube and another 250,000 views across Ted Baker’s own social channels.
2. Carlsberg Chocolate Bar
When Carlsberg do marketing, they don’t do anything in half measures. From beer dispensing billboards to Christmas trees. Is there anything the good folks at Carlsberg won’t turn into a beer tap? Evidently, the answer is no.
Easter isn’t typically a beer-drinking holiday, but the team at Carlsberg wanted to change that. They brought a whole new meaning to the words ‘Chocolate Bar’ by making an entirely edible pop-up bar, which included fully functioning Carlsberg taps.
3. Budweiser Beer Garage at SXSW
American brewery, Anheuser-Busch, brought their Virtual Reality brewery tour to Texas this year for SXSW and transformed the Ironwood Hall into the Budweiser Beer Garage.
This was a 4-D fully immersive experience which saw people don VR headsets and take a tour of the Anheuser Busch brewery. They incorporated the smells, sounds and most importantly, the tastes of the brewery into this experience. Whilst people were taking the VR tour, members of the Anheuser-Busch team would hold jars of hops under the noses of the participant, spray water where needed, and of course the tour was finished off with a sample of their most famous beer, Budweiser.
4. McDonald’s Happy Goggles
Back in February 2016, McDonald’s Sweden jumped on the VR bandwagon with their introduction of “Happy Goggles” – a perfect branded take-home for kids and adults alike.
The iconic McDonald’s Happy Meal box could be transformed into a cardboard VR headset, working much like Google Cardboard. The customer simply tears the box along a series of perforated edges, folds accordingly and slot in the plastics lenses which comes with the box. The headset worked as a virtual reality viewer with almost any smartphone.
McDonald’s also released a VR game Slope Wars, as the launch coincided with the Swedish skiing holiday “Sportlov”, around which time many swedish families hit the slopes.
5. Burger King dresses up as McDonald’s
Last Halloween a New York based Burger King store dressed up in a highly controversial costume. And when we say the store dressed up, we don’t mean the staff, we mean the actually building was dressed up as the ghost of McDonald’s. It was a bold move to say the least. They had the building draped in white sheets that said McDonald’s on them and then underneath there was a caption that read “Just kidding, we still flame grill our burgers”.
The even transformed the burger boxes into ghosts!
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