Creative and Original Advertisements Part 1: Print Ads & Billboards
This post is about some of the most creative advertising campaigns that took place over the past decades. Here is a compilation so that we can see how companies are using creativity and originality as the most powerful tool to stand out from the clutter. It’s also a means to inspire your brand to take innovative actions based on previous successful campaigns. As traditional newspapers, billboards, and TV ads are facing so much fierce competition, consumers are simply ignoring most of them and therefore, make billions of marketing budgets spent almost uselessly. Creativity and unexpected ad placements will be the future of successful marketing campaigns.
This part 1 is only about the print advertisements, either in magazines, newspapers or billboards. In the second part of this blog, I will present famous and original examples of guerrilla marketing. The common point of all these ads is the clear value proposition given through visualization. All these ads worked well because it uses stimuli that activate our reptilian brain as explained by Patrick Renvoisé in his Ted Talk.
We can see through these examples that, in our digital world, print ads can still be a powerful tool to convey simple messages and unique selling proposition. Most of these ads don’t have their logos clearly shown on the ad. As consumers become more savvy, they don’t trust marketing messages with prominent logo or basic selling messages anymore, such as “Buy our new soda” or “Our laundry detergent is the best, try it”. Messages are much more expressed through simple visuals than in the past; clarity and simplicity are the elements that allows your print ads to stand out from the competition.
We can also see that print ads can be smartly used for public service announcements and from NGOs campaigns. This is one way by which marketing can enhance people’s living conditions and health through marketing campaigns of UNICEF or CRS for example. But marketing can also enhance the environment and our habits by raising awareness about the environment through NGOs such as WWF or Greenpeace, which made very successful marketing campaigns over the last years.