Turning marketing upside down

From immersive Netflix experience to innovative paint jobs, advertising is changing fast in the digital age

I was going through Fast Company’s list for 2023 of organisations that are reshaping industries and culture. I picked the ones in advertising and communication for discussion today. One look at the future of advertising, and the most common denominator I figured centres around a diversity of creative and strategically sound work that doesn’t rely on any one silver-bullet approach. Allow me to share some outstanding examples — each a demonstration of an acute understanding of audiences and what attracts, engages, and entertains them. Hence, makes them Fast companies.

For Netflix’s Stranger Things, “experiential” agency Giant Spoon used the Empire State Building as a canvas for bringing consumers into the series’ fourth season. New Yorkers witnessed the spectacle of a mysterious rift slowly cracking open on its facade, serving as a portal to an immersive journey into the Upside Down. This was the first time the skyscraper allowed for lights, sound, and projection to be combined into a fully immersive show. This event became the anchor that spurred 14 other reality-bending activations all around the world. Even agencies in India are also trying to do similar stuff but the scale and skill still have a long way to go.

Last year, advertising company TBWA/Chiat/Day New York created the Golden Grounds campaign for Lay’s potato chips, linking it to football in a unique — and tasty — way. The campaign used soil from NFL team stadiums to cultivate team-specific plots in a potato field, which ultimately became chips in team-branded bags. What a simple but fabulous idea! Wonder why can’t Lay’s do the same for the IPL?

The same agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Los Angeles office created Music in Color, a new colour-selection tool for Behr Paint in 2023. Made in collaboration with Katy Perry, using an algorithm developed with Spotify that helps people discover personalised paint colour recommendations based on their favourite songs, it is really an innovative marketing tool. Average time spent on the Music in Color/Spotify microsite was more than two-and-a-half minutes, with 34 per cent of users heading directly to Behr’s online sales platform, which saw a 13 per cent increase in online revenue. Surely, Indian paint companies like Kansai Nerolac, Berger and Asian should check this out.

Another interesting example that I liked was from multi-cultural ad agency, Majority. When the Biden Administration reached out to digital dating companies to help promote Covid vaccinations, Majority worked with Match Group’s BLK app to rework rapper Juvenile’s classic 1998 hit “Back That Thang Up” into “Vax That Thang Up.” The result was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, with 7 billion impressions, more than 700 pieces of editorial coverage and 70 TV broadcast segments. BLK saw a 30 per cent increase in new customers, a 21 per cent increase in advertising awareness, and its overall brand awareness nearly doubled. In addition to all this, more than 500,000 daters on the app used the “Vaxified Badge” to share their vax status on their profiles. Phenomenal, no?

Fast Company this year also has a case study from India — Ogilvy India’s  #NotJustACadbury ad using a machine learning platform built by the firm Rephrase.ai, and how it tapped Bollywood’s biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, to churn out over 2,000 ads via facial recognition software, urging shoppers to visit local stores during Diwali. Kudos to Ogilvy for such out-of-the-box thinking and putting India on Fast’s global map. For deo Axe, The Martin Agency last year went inside the 2017 video game Fortnite and collaborated with streamer Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf to create “Mistaverse Island,” an in-game location where players could play the popular Capture the Flag challenge, but with special boosters that looked like Axe spray cans. Not only did the work give Fortnite fans something new to play with, it did so by tapping into the community through Giersdorf. In India, we may not fully understand this innovation but if you actually play the game, you would be amazed by its ingenuity and immersiveness. 

In the examples cited above, most of these companies turned marketing upside down. Believe me, it is not easy to do. Never has been. Regretfully, most ad agency guys today still don’t fully understand what technology can do to brand messaging. Some are just plain old world — still hanging around in the era of print and double-spreads; most others, a vast majority, still hanker for the 30-second television spot; those that profess to be the digital types don’t think beyond clever social media posts. The advertising of today, and tomorrow, has however moved far ahead, and far beyond. Those that don’t change will “Fast” be left behind.  

The writer is chairman of Rediffusion