About About
Contact RSS Twitter Facebook LinkedIn

Exponential Blog

09 Sep

Phil Buxton showcases his top 10 digital campaigns of the decade for IAB Engage

Phil Buxton Uncategorized 0

Exponential is again the premier sponsor of the UK IAB’s blue riband event, Engage 2014. It’s the tenth year of this event – the first featured Bill Gates, Sir Martin Sorrell and Lord Puttnam – and, this year, the IAB is asking its sponsors to have a look back of the last decade of internet advertising.

As part of this effort, it asked our CMO Phil Buxton to outline his top ten digital campaigns of the last ten years. And here they are:

iab-engage-logo-yellow

Think about it: ‘the top ten digital campaigns of the last ten years’. When you do, you start to see that great online campaigns still don’t live in the mind the way great TV work or even outdoor work does. This is a function of the limitless fragmentation of media online. Millions of ‘channels’ means fragmented audiences means less opportunity to get to us all in one shot.

That choice also means media owners and advertisers can try to interrupt us with their messages online but the price they pay in lost audiences is higher. All in all, it means remembering great online campaigns is a tough ask and it’s why the list below is filled more with symbolic work – campaigns that are representative of a time or a shift or some of the keys to successful digital thinking and execution. And it shows that to be remembered these days, you have to think so much harder and deeper than a big-budget 30-second TV spot.

 

My top 10 digital campaigns of the decade

1. The first advertiser-funded banner ad: HotWired, the web version of Wired magazine, carried a banner ad for AT&T by agency The Wonderfactory in 1994. The copy went ‘Have you clicked your mouse right here? You will.’

2. Ironic then that my favourite banner campaign was by Glue Media (as it was then) for Virgin Money circa 2005 because they made the ad non-clickable. You see, if it really is a brand awareness campaign, why would you be measuring clicks?

3. What we might call a boring one, except that Dare’s multi-award winning email campaign for the AA offered sequential ads that totally worked. Didn’t convert first time? Have a discount. Still no? Have a bigger one. Not pretty but oh so effective.

4. The age of content-only driven, social media-enabled advertising arrived in digital when Cadbury’s threw a gorilla suit on a bloke to mime-drum to Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’. My digital equivalent of BBH’s Flat Eric for Levi’s.

5. And, likewise, I remember the man beating up the bear to steal his salmon for John West. It was in 2006 and is my first memory of a ‘viral video’ (that is, a video that got shared a lot).

6. And I recall Aussie beer brand Carlton Draught achieving similar sharing joy with ‘Big Ad’, a brilliant parody of the peak of big-budget TV spots by the likes of British Airways.

7. So how about a new one? The no make-up selfie social campaign for Cancer Research is said to have raised £8m and is the reason so many people have been drenched in ice water lately.

8. The first ‘integrated’ campaign. The word bandied around even more than engagement might actually have been successfully manifested in Dove’s ‘real beauty’ campaign when digital goodies were as core as the TV work.

9. The story goes that Pizza Hut in America built an application so that World of Warcraft-type gamers (the game was Everquest II) could check a menu, order a pizza and have it delivered to their door without leaving the game. Even better, the game alerted them when the pizza arrived. Just think about the complete brilliance of that idea. Proof it existed here and here.

10. And then I can’t help thinking about all those blue chip companies that built an ‘office’ in Second Life. All that glitters…

See the original version of this article and find out more about Engage 2014 at http://www.iabuk.net/blog/engage-2014-ten-of-the-best-exponential#JfDiVZoamQerRwSg.99


About the Author: Phil Buxton

Philip Buxton is the chief marketing officer for Exponential and responsible for the development and promotion of the Exponential proposition and all its divisions in the Americas, EMEA and APAC.

He has been part of the digital media and marketing industry since 1998, initially as a reporter then editor at the biggest marketing trade magazines in the UK, including Marketing Week, Netimperative and Revolution. He became a digital media consultant in 2007, helping major media businesses adapt to the digital shift before starting his own freelance consultancy business where he worked with digital players like iCrossing, TagMan and Tribal Fusion to improve their marketing, before taking the role of Global VP, marketing for Tribal Fusion in 2011 and CMO, Exponential in January 2012.

Read all posts by this author


About

This is the blog of Exponential Interactive Inc.,(www.exponential.com) a global provider of advertising intelligence and digital media solutions to brand advertisers.

Posts

Popular Posts

  • Exponential take on the GTA gamer
    News, Research

    Exponential take on the GTA gamer

    Read what The Telegraph and Daily Mail had to say...

  • Doug Conely champions Machine Learning for 2017, other trends in Figaro Digital
    Featured, News, Opinion

    Doug Conely champions Machine Learning for 2017, other trends in Figaro Digital

      In the latest article on Figaro Digital, titled “Ask...

  • Exponential introduces new mobile and in-stream video solutions to Latin American market
    News

    Exponential introduces new mobile and in-stream video solutions to Latin American market

    Exponential, the global provider of advertising intelligence...

  • Exponential’s VP talks ad fraud in MediaPost
    News

    Exponential’s VP talks ad fraud in MediaPost

    “When you get beyond 3,000, God knows what’s...

Tag Cloud

Aussie Australia Day Brand Safety creative Digital Digital Trading Standards Group EU advertising German online advertising Instream ads Internet of things m-commerce Media millennials Mobile video Movie Marketing Outstream Ads Performance performance marketing politics Sales Spanish automotive Spanish online advertising superbowl Video Ad news Wearable technology


  • Home
Home Home
Contact RSS Twitter Facebook LinkedIn

Copyright © 2011 Exponential Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.
Designed by Digital Lemonade