IMC Hawks Blog

Tag: Australia

  • One Country Painted Red

    With the rapid growth of new products, brand extensions and the blurring of traditional and new age advertising, marketing and advertising to target audiences has reached a new level of competitiveness. Brands now must adapt to this changing environment and contest with competitors to stay at the top of their market and target to audiences in creative, attention-grabbing tactics.

    The most iconic brand in the soda market, and throughout the world, is undoubtedly that of Coca-Cola. In the summer of 2011, Coke created an original marketing strategy to run a campaign that would inspire people to connect with the brand both online and offline in order to acclimate to the changing marketing environment. The campaign’s prime objective was to increase consumption of Coke over the summer season and to get people to fall in love with the iconic brand again. Particularly, in Australia, at the time nearly 50% of teens and young adults had never tasted a Coke and this drove the brand to reconnect with the country.

    Established in Australia, the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign immediately received positive media attention and consumer responsiveness. The idea of the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was to place Australia’s 150 most popular names on the front of millions of Coca-Cola bottles, simple right? This was the first time in 125 years that Coke had made such a paramount transformation to it packaging, and it was revolutionary.

    “We used publicly available data to review the most popular names in Australia and ethnic representation in Australia to ensure the diversity of our multi-cultural nation was represented appropriately.”

    – Coca-Cola Spokesperson.

    The Coca-Cola brand wanted to initiate conversations by putting Australians front and center and inspire them to connect with people and ‘Share a Coke’. The central theme that gave ‘Share a Coke’ its power was the way a brand so universal could replace its logo with individual names by reaching out to consumers and personalizing its brand to individuals.

    “We are using the power of the first name in a playful and social way to remind people of those in their lives they may have lost touch with, or have yet to connect with”

    -Lucie Austin, Marketing Director for Coca-Cola South Pacific.

    The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign strategically exhibited that when personalization in advertising is done the right way, it can be highly appealing and extremely effective. While Coke got personal, media was buzzing with talk over what the brand was implementing behind the personalization. Coke remained silent until Australia’s highest rated media weekend. The campaign was revealed to the public and aired across the biggest weekend in Australian sport, during the AFL (Australian Football League) and NRL (National Rugby League) grand finals which reached over 30% of the population.

    Succeeding the campaign launch, requests for more names were coming in the thousands. Coke was prepared for this boom of requests by setting up kiosks that toured 18 Westfield shopping centers attracting consumers to personalize any name on a Coca-Cola bottle.

    Coke wanted to especially reach out to the 50% of young adults that had never tasted a Coke in Australia, and there was no better way to reach this target market than online. Participation and mass allocation was achieved through Facebook by providing consumers with the resources to connect and ‘Share a Coke’ by creating a personalized virtual Coke bottle to share with a Facebook friend. Consumers were tagging friends in pictures with personalized Coke bottles and sharing stories on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Coke consumers also could create their own commercials! With the abundance of requests still pouring in, Coke told consumers to put in a vote of “who do you want to share a Coke with the most?” via Facebook. After 65,000 people voted, Coke bottles with 50 new names were released. “Consumers were invited to SMS a friend’s name, which was projected live onto the iconic ‘Coca-Cola’ sign at Sydney’s King’s Cross. They then received an MMS enabling them to share their friend’s name up in lights, via Facebook and email.”

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    The multi-platform communications strategy was implemented to ‘Share a Coke’ with someone you know, or want to know and ultimately gave people the resources to find, connect and share. After 3 short months of running the campaign, young adult Coca-Cola consumption increased significantly in Australia by up to 7%, making 2011 Coke’s most fruitful summer season in history. The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign resulted in 76,000 virtual coke cans shared, 378,000 extra coke cans printed at kiosks, and 5% more people were drinking coke. Coca-Cola had successfully won over Australia and became a part of popular culture again.

    -Briana McWhirter

  • “Dumb Ways to Die” Campaign—Dumb Enough to Work?

    What do you think of when you hear “Australia”? Accents? Kangaroos? The Great Barrier Reef? Wouldn’t it be nice to be there in lieu of the recent frigid weather? I bet two things no one would ever put together is Australia and train safety, but you probably will after seeing the two awareness commercials Australia has recently released for the Melbourne Metro.

    In 2012 “Dumb Ways to Die” was launched as a train safety PSA. The three-minute animated spot features personified blobs making outrageously stupid decisions –  setting your hair on fire, eating out of date medicine, using the clothes dryer as a hiding place, selling both kidneys on the Internet. With these demonstrations, comes a catchy song that illustrates each scene as it unfolds. At the 2:24 mark, the audience is introduced to train safety in which the dumbest ways to die are: standing on the edge of a train station platform, driving around the barrier at a railroad crossing, and running across the tracks.

    This year, another PSA spot appeared just in time for Valentine’s Day. Titled “Dumb Ways”, the second video – this only ones 30 seconds – features the blob from the original spot who died from selling both his kidneys on the Internet and replicates the format of the first spot with the simplistic design elements, characters, and tune. Even though the new spot has absolutely no correlation with train safety, the advertisement’s copy reads “Be safe around Valentine’s Day*” and in smaller font, “*and trains”.

    With the release of the newest Valentine spot, it is obvious that McCann Melbourne realized the success first 3 minute spot reached with over 71 million YouTube views. However, the Valentine Day advertisement is relying on the presumption that the viewer has already seen previous campaign efforts, which include radio, print and outdoor advertising. The campaign even has some interactive media such as a fully functioning website and a mobile phone game app that offers short mini games where you can save the characters from their “dumb” deaths.

    There is no denying that the whole campaign is undeniably cute and captures attention, but the question is, is this direction effective?

    When asked about the creation and initial vision of the campaign, John Mescall, McCann’s executive director, said this, “The idea for a song started from a very simple premise: What if we disguised a worthy safety message inside something that didn’t feel at all like a safety message? So we thought about what the complete opposite of a serious safety message would be and came to the conclusion it was an insanely happy and cute song.”

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    What Mescall is describing is the use of logical fallacy or in our case irrelevant points. Usually the use of fallacies in an argument or message weakens it, but Mescall used it to his advantage, strengthening the impact.

    One logical fallacy, argumentum ad baculum, is an argument that uses threats or forces to cause the acceptance of the conclusion. Example: “Do this! Or ____ will happen!” “If you don’t this, ____ will happen!” The Dumb Ways campaign uses this fallacy’s appeal to fear in the explicit form of death – if you do these activities in the ad you will die – to remind people of the need for train safety.

    In addition, another logical fallacy is also used – red herring. In this type, a fallacy of diversion is created where irrelevant arguments or information is introduced into a discussion in order to divert people’s attention away from the issue under discussion and towards a different conclusion. No one needs to know all the dumb ways to die; almost all of the scenarios are things that are common sense. Except for the last 30 seconds, none of the scenarios are relevant to educating people on train safety.

    Over a year after the original launch of the “Dumb Ways to Die” commercial, the campaign has grabbed the attention of the world, educating all of us on train safety. What do you think of this PSA? Do you think the campaign could have been stronger if the agency had gone in a different direction?

    –Savannah Valade, Elizabeth Harrington, Caroline Robinson