Creative marketing campaigns: why the audience at Contagious last night got it wrong
I’ve only recently discovered it, but I really love Contagious. If you’ve never heard of it, Contagious runs an event where some of the best minds in marketing talk about some of the most creative marketing campaigns they’ve worked on. There’s pizza and beer, but that’s not the only reason I like going. The reason I go is because the creativity on show is genuinely amazing.
One particular section of the event I enjoy involves two or three marketers going head to head against each other, presenting their creative marketing campaigns to the audience who then vote for their favourite.
Last night, it was Burger King versus The Japanese Red CrossSociety. The latter won the vote of the audience, but I want to argue the casefor the former, whose campaign was, to me, a more successful campaign becauseit actually achieved what it set out to achieve.
#BPM100
Let me start with the Red Cross’s campaign.
The Red Cross had cottoned on to a problem when medicalreports earlier in 2019 found that Japan’s survival rate for cardiac arrest waslow in comparison to other countries. The report concluded that many victims ofcardiac arrest could’ve been saved if they had received CPR.
The society therefore put their creative minds to work toraise awareness of the importance of CPR and get people to learn it —especially among young people where awareness levels were dangerously low.
The idea they came up with was creative ingenuity. UsingTikTok, a social video app where users can share short videos, the societychallenged people to perform a dance sequence to a song of 100 beats per minute(bpm) as a way to practise the five CPR steps: evaluate the scene, call forhelp, check for breathing, interlock the fingers and perform chestcompressions. And thus the #BPM100campaign was born.
By most campaigns’ standards, the uptake of the challengewas huge. The campaign went viral, racking up 30.2 million views and 1.51million likes within two months of its launch— “an unprecedented levelof engagement for a CPR campaign”, the organisation’s press release on the wiresaid. Moreover, at the last count, the campaign had exceeded more than abillion impressions online.
The silent drive-thru
Now on to Burger King’s campaign.
Burger King, a global brand, had noticed that sales inFinland weren’t quite performing. The company then set out to find out why.
Through doing audience research, the organisation learnedquite how introverted Finns tend to be in comparison to customers from other nations.And let’s face it Burger King’s brand is pretty extroverted. In the US,surrounded by a fairly extroverted culture with loud and brash sportspeople, “musicians”and Donald Trump, an extroverted approach to branding might work well for anAmerican audience. But abroad, with a fairly quiet and calm Finnish audience, BurgerKing’s brand, with its fiery nature and loud deep voiceover on its adverts, wasn’tquite washing.
So Burger King did what all great global brands do when theyhad a bit of a brand problem — they adapted their approach within the confinesof the company’s positioning of Have it your way.
Burger King therefore launched the silentdrive-thru, where customers would place their order via an app, and collecttheir order through the designated silent drive area, where a member of stafffrom Burger King would pass them their meal without uttering a word.
The results? The company saw a 45% increase in app downloadsand sales through the app have doubled each month through since the launch ofthe campaign.
There was only one clear winner…
For me, Burger King won this hands down. While the #100BPMcampaign generated more coverage, more impressions, more likes and more “buzz”(eughh), only the silent drive-thru actually achieved what it set out toachieve, which was to sell more burgers.
I’m not saying that by comparison the Red Cross’s campaignwas bad or less creative — my problem with the campaign was that we didn’t findout if it actually worked. Do more people in Japan now know CPR? Do kidsactually understand that the lovely dancing in the videos actually had a pointbeyond just dancing? Has there been a noticeable increase in the number ofsurvivals of cardiac arrest in Japan since the campaign launched?
I don’t know because the presenter didn’t tell us. Instead, she focused mainly on vanity metrics and showed us the praise the campaign got in the marketing media, which is beside the point because how many Japanese kids read AdAge? But when asked why the judges also picked The Japanese Red Cross Society’s campaign as the winner, one said: “because of the Red Cross’s contribution to society.”
Facepalm.
Of course we can argue that The Red Cross has a better moral purpose in life than Burger King. But that’s not what we’re judging here — we’re judging which campaign was more effective at achieving something. I really couldn’t give two hoots about how many billion impressions or how many hundreds of pieces of coverage your campaign generates. If you can’t demonstrate that your creative marketing campaigns effect the change you want them to, you can’t call them a success.
To find out how we as an industry should really be measuring creativity, I’ve written another (slightly more tedious but nonetheless important) blog post about it for Wildfire.