The advertising industry is seemingly more competitive than ever before, so it certainly is not the right time to rest on your marketing laurels. It is the era or creativity and inventiveness; coming up with something new and innovative that your competitors have not yet thought of.
There will always be risks of being the first company to try something, but there can be quite a lot of rewards when things go to plan, or even better than you expected. If you do not put yourself out there, you will never know if your great idea could have been a success… or at least until another company does it and they get all of the mentions in the media!
So perhaps it is the right time for you to do some serious creative thinking. What could you do that will bring the spotlight onto your brand and new product? Here are just a few things that have shaken up various industries in the past, which could give you the sudden brainwave you need to get started:
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Augmented Reality
Augmented reality (AR) is still being developed as this post is being published, but it has already been used in some pretty creative ways. Restaurant chains in the UK and US have used the technology to bring paper menus to life with the use of a smartphone. What was once just a list of meal choices suddenly turned into a game that could be played whilst waiting for a food to be served. Magazines have also used AR to bring an interactive element to magazine covers and special features inside.
Interactive Video
Yet interactivity has been developed in another way too, by means of corporate video. There have been some major advancements in this area, which really lets customers get involved with a brand on a new level. One recent example was a catwalk show having clickable elements so viewers could find out some more details about what they were most interested in. This is expected to become even more intelligent in the next couple of years as online stores connect their shopping basket and checkouts to interactive videos.
Power by Tweets
The travel industry has been pushing forward with a lot of clever ideas this year; this is not too surprising as many of them attend conferences and exhibitions where they are shown some new technologies. However it seems that these companies have the right staff in order to make the most of the technology on offer. One example is BA who advertised their Dreamliner service by asking fans of the brand to ‘tweet’ through social media site Twitter in order to ‘race the plane’. This was a real time race between a twitter-fuelled plane, and one real BA flight that was doing the same route. It got a lot of people involved as flight tickets were up for grabs.
Clever Data
Finally, could you use data to the best effect? An example of this is when BA launched billboards in 2013 that tracked planes landing and depicted the flight details on them. This was part of their #lookup campaign that involved kids on billboards pointing to the planes in the sky as they were landing. Think about how you could do something clever with the data you have available.
What other clever ways have you advertised a product before?
About Carson Derrow
