Coca-Cola
It feels like every time we do one of these things, Coca-Cola pops up somewhere. They’ve really got this marketing thing down! They made a cute campaign called “Share a Coke”, where you could get a Coke bottle personalised with your name or your loved one’s name. Then, they got people to share pictures of their personalised Cokes online tagging them with #ShareACoke. People started sharing everything from happy birthday wishes to a wedding proposal!
Burberry
The clothing line created a website called The Art of the Trench, where owners of their famous trench oats could upload their outfits and people could comment on them. You could sort it by time, whether the photos were of men or women, the colour or style of the coat and even the weather. The result? A 50% increase in online sales year-over-year.
Lay’s
The popular crisp brand ran a campaign called “Do Us a Flavor“, where people would send in their ideas for new and unusual crisp flavours. The three final flavours were actually produced and sold. Then, users could go online and vote for their favourites. The person who came up with the winning flavour not only got their dream crisps sold long-term, but they also got money and were featured in the ads.
In case you’re curious, the flavours were Cheesy Garlic Bread, Chicken & Waffles, and Sriracha – chosen out of 3.8 million submissions!
Old Spice
Do you remember “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”? The ads were quirky and fun (and still make me laugh after seeing them a bunch of times). This was a fantastic use of an insight they found — that a lot of the time, it’s actually women who are buying men’s body wash products. The user-generated bit came in when the actor featured in the ads responded to fans on Twitter and Facebook in real-time. In other words, they managed to get people participating in what had been a more conventional form of advertising.
Starbucks
The White Cup Contest was perfect to attract creative coffee lovers. The idea was that they would draw on a classic white Starbucks cup and then show off a picture of what they came up with. The winner would get their design printed on limited edition Starbucks cups. In three weeks, they got 4,000 entries!
T-Mobile
The guy in charge at US T-Mobile, John Legere, isn’t afraid to be controversial, and T-Mobile’s ads are often the same. They ran an ad encouraging customers of other networks to write a break up letter to their provider. In exchange, T-Mobile said they’d pay any early termination fees. Guess how many people submitted letters? 80,000!
Not only did it create a humorous conversation online, it also gave T-Mobile tons of insights from customers into what they didn’t like from their providers (a.k.a things they could avoid doing).
