Welcome to the inaugural Marketing Stoak Report. This will be a monthly collection of marketing campaigns, interesting strategies and some of our favorite marketing things from around the world. While we are taking a look at fascinating finds from the previous month, they will be broken down into two categories, What We’re Stoaked On, and What We’re Not Stoaked On. There are various reasons as to why a campaign would make either list, such as outstanding creativity and ingenuity, while on the other hand, incongruent messaging and poor targeting could land you in the other.
What We’re NOT Stoaked On
Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold – 6 for 6-Pack
February is a unique month for marketing. Some of the largest brands in the world carve out a significant chunk of their advertising budgets for 30-second and 1-minute spots for a single sporting event, the Super Bowl. Oddly enough, it’s also one of the only instances where the millions of viewers are actually looking forward to watching the commercials, enabling the spots to garner such premiums.
During this year’s Super Bowl, Michelob ULTRA aired the below 1-minute commercial spotlighting Pure Gold, the organic version of the brand’s light beer.
After first watch, it seems like a good cause and decent connection between farmers and the brand’s organic beer. However, when you being to dissect the message and the avenue they took to tell us this, a disconnect begins to appear.
The rules for the donation at the end of the commercial are:
- Michelob will donate 2 cents to farmers for every six pack sold.
- The cap for the donation is $1,000,000
A few other details are important. A six pack of Pure Gold costs about $8. In order to meet the donation limit of $1 million, consumers will need to buy 50,000,000 six packs of beer from Michelob ($0.02 x 50,000,000 = $1,000,000). Now at $8 a pack, this donation will cost consumers $400,000,000!
On average, Super Bowl advertisements cost about $5 million per 30 seconds this year, so Michelob spent most likely around $10 million to publicize this campaign. Now it begs the question, if the goal is to help farmers, why not just donate the $10 million straight to them??
Burger King – The Moldy Whopper
The Mold Whopper campaign highlighted Burger King’s new preservative free option with a time-lapse video of the burger 34-days later.
You can see the moldy burger in all its glory. It’s fuzzy, blue and honestly resembles what SpongeBob tried to serve to the health inspector.
We get what they were trying to convey – their burger made is made of natural ingredients… Even more likely, they were trying to directly compare with McDonald’s never-decaying burger – a story a few years ago that highlighted a McDonald’s burger that showed no signs of rotting after 6 years of sitting out, which is pretty unbelievable.
However, a moldy whopper isn’t something that most people have ever thought of before – and not sure that we ever wanted to see. In fact, the campaign creates the complete opposite action they should be trying to stimulate. It doesn’t get us in the mood for one of their burgers and it’s tough to even maintain an appetite when the first thing you picture when you’re about to eat your Whopper is mold. Not Stoaked.
What We ARE Stoaked On
Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources – Share Before It Turns Into Stories
This is a Brazlian print advertisement developed by Linha Verde that uses the adoption of a popular local saying, “Take care of nature and denounce any attempt against it. Protecting our future starts with this attitude.”
Major shoutout to Linha and the creative team on this one. It’s an eye-catching advertisement with ingenious execution. There are no fancy design tactics or anything like that, it’s just a great concept for an ad and the audience immediately understands what they’re trying to convey without having to speak Portuguese.
It’s also a poignant ad for the world not just Brazil, especially with the forest fires in Australia and all the destruction that has occurred there recently. Aside from just being a print ad, this could be a digital success as well. It’s a metaphor for the thousands of adventure and nature accounts we always see in Instagram and wish we could visit one day. This would be a post you couldn’t just scroll by.
Ford EcoSport – Surf Tag
We are going back to Brazil for an ad developed by the Brazilian Ford team and their partnering marketing agency.
Here’s the concept: São Paulo, Brazil, is a landlocked city with no beach, and yet a large surfing population. According to Ford, there are 150,000 surfers in São Paulo who need to drive in order to get to a beach. In order to make it easier for EcoSport owning surfers to paddle out, Ford has a new offering called the EcoSport Surf Tag – a technology that will send the owner a text when surf conditions are good and will pay the toll fee for Ford SUVs that day.
Ford developed the following video highlighting the Surf Tag:
It’s a well-made video with cinematic footage of their vehicle, the city and the surf – all things to capture any surfers attention. The real kicker of the video though, is that it features the world’s #1 ranked surfer and 2019 World Surf League Champion, Italo Ferreira. We see too many brands using a celebrity just for the sake of using a celebrity, not taking into account fit for the campaign. This is not the case – we couldn’t think of a better person to include in their campaign, especially with Italo being Brazil’s darling coming off a world championship.
This is a video that could live on any digital or social platform in Brazil and keep the EcoSport top of mind for any avid surfer considering a new vehicle – pretty good for a text and toll fee.