But it’s Pride again and Burger King Austria has brought out a campaign that has everyone with a Twitter handle burning the midnight tweets. 

Let’s talk about it. 

The Burger King Pride Ad 2022

Burger King has been bringing out Pride ads since 2014, so this isn’t exactly out of the left field for them. In fact, given Burger King’s most recent ads, this is exactly what a 2022 Pride ad for a Burger King branch is supposed to be: tongue-in-cheek, light-hearted, and kind of silly. 

The backlash against this ad goes one of two ways: either ‘burgers don’t have to be a political statement’ or ‘you didn’t consult a single queer person in making this ad’. Thinkpieces on CNN, Forbes, Gizmodo, and others have been making the rounds on social media by taking jokes about the tweet out of context under the banner of rage, and racking up a lot of views in the process. 

And – through it all – Burger King gets free publicity. 

It’s an ingenious, calculated marketing move that shows clearly that Burger King has learned from its mistakes. 

Or, it’s a mistake, but a harmless one. 

Here’s what we think.

Why Burger King Pride 2022 Works

Look: pride campaigns have a challenging road ahead of them to ‘good’. When you throw in a human cause with the express intention of drawing your audience to one side of the line in the sand, something will get mixed up along the way, and what you’ll be left with is an ad campaign that phones it in. 

There are exceptions. 

This Burger King Pride ad is one of them. 

It’s different. It stands out without taking the same route to Pride as other brands do: the rainbow packaging, the all-inclusive catch-phrase. Burger King, as a brand, is still at the forefront of this ad, something that becomes a rarity once Pride comes around and organisations try to make it very clear where they stand. 

It sticks to the brand tone of voice.

It sparked a conversation. 

It doesn’t pander. And the choice of translating it into English for international appeal can be seen as a deliberate move to get exactly this sort of reaction; to see exactly this kind of conversation play out. 

As Tom put it, “it’s just a bit funny, really, and sort of – reverse psychology, I think. It’s all we’ve been talking about, after all.”

From a quick look at Twitter, Tom seems to be right on the money. The most popular tweet about the whole saga gained 12.8k retweets and over 600k likes in just five days. 

On the other hand: Why Burger King Pride 2022 doesn’t work

The biggest thing that has been said about it online is ‘you didn’t consult anyone gay, did you?’

As a Pride ad without the Pride taken into account, it works. 

Once you look at the audience that it was intended for, you can see that it doesn’t really. Or, as our Accounts Manager Lisa Cutugno said, “it’s like they didn’t think it through.”

Top and bottom subcultures have been around for decades, so using terminology that’s thrived since the 50s is a step in the right direction. The problem lies in the fact that the terminologies used have taken on a different identity in the mainstream, and it’s partially the concept of always-online fandom culture to blame. 

Luke puts it best, “it seems like they didn’t take into account the fact that the terms ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ have entered the mainstream lexicon in the last few years and just went the equal route, as in same-sex – this might have worked better like 7 or 8 years ago when those terms were less well known, perhaps.”

Actually it’s been done before—

In 2017, McDonald’s came out with this campaign. 

It’s an identical campaign, save for a different cast and country.

What’s interesting about this campaign is that it didn’t have any backlash. 

To be fair, it also wasn’t well-known outside of the country – two things that set the Burger King Austria ad apart. Whether or not it is more successful than the McDonald’s campaign of 2017 has yet to be seen, but it is definitely far more noticeable which says a lot about the way that consumers have changed the way they feel about these conversations.

Risk or Reward?

Controversial or not, our CEO had a very valid point to make: “if you are not ready to face potential backlash, you’ll never do anything different. So I applaud their appetite for risk, even if they went awry this time around.”

Burger King has a tendency to make mistakes. All big corporations will eventually put out an ad that draws ire from someone. 

However, it seems as though the fallout from their Women’s Day tweet seems to have taught them a lesson in how to balance risk with reward, and when to go for it.

At the end of the day, this campaign is not going to be remembered in the long-run – but for a brief moment, it had the whole world talking and no lasting damage was done except to fragile right-wing pundits who get offended at everything. 

All in all, not bad for a regional campaign. 

The post Burger King Pride 2022, or When Controversy Works appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The post My experience in digital marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

No, we’re not talking about the Aerosmith hit, no matter how good it may have been. We’re talking about being jaded in the aspect of digital marketing. Let’s refresh your memory. Jaded means “bored or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something.” Sounds like a familiar feeling?
Being jaded in the digital world has become common. It’s something that any serious digital marketer would take into consideration and plan for. It comes into effect in many ways, here are two of the most important ones to keep in mind.

Ad Blindness

As a society we’ve become almost immune to advertising. We see ads everywhere from the moment we wake up and drive to work, to the moment we get into bed. We’re bombarded with special offers, marketing campaigns, and non stop adverts. Eventually we get so used to these that they become background noise. We automatically tune out and stop paying attention (unless it’s an advert for a product we’re interested in). When it comes to online advertising our eyes have become accustomed to the positioning of ads, such as banners, in particular locations on a website. We filter out these adverts, focussing on the valuable information instead. Of course the ads do work to a certain level, specifically on a subconscious one. However it’s important to constantly update your ad sets and not let them run for too long.

Same tactics, different day

Everything in the digital world works as though it’s on overdrive, and this includes campaign lifetimes. Trends come and go quicker than anything on a Paris runway. Staying at the top of the game is quite the challenge. Consumers become accustomed to the same marketing tactics. They start to see past the charade and learn how the game works. Things in the digital world tend to become overdone. They reach such a high point of virality that eventually they become annoying (like planking, and even the ice bucket challenge) whereas the same competitions become dragging (think ‘like my photo to help me win’).
Thankfully we’re seeing a shift from the short term, high engagement campaigns – the kind of campaigns which don’t last very long but create a peak in engagement. Once these campaigns fizzle out, the brand’s reach goes back to normal until the next big competition comes around. These days the focus is more on having consistency – being relevant throughout in order to have true, genuine engagement and a loyal fan base.
By analysing the top marketing trends and constantly thinking of innovative ways of engaging your audience you’ll automatically improve your chances of remaining relevant. Don’t fall into a marketing rut where you simply copy what your competitors do – dare to be different, and always make it new.

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Why is everybody moving more of their spend online?

The answer is simple, really. The value for money to be had with effective online marketing is stunning when compared to traditional media. No matter what your ultimate promotional goal is, you always get much more mileage from online marketing.

What are the ways I can advertise online?

There are loads of ways to grow your brand and sales efforts online, but in reality, when starting off you have five main ways of buying advertising online.

Banner (or Display) advertising

This is one of the very first forms of online advertising. It started off as the equivalent of print advertising, and it was therefore mainly priced that way. People used to just buy slots around the content of a site. Nowadays it is more common to buy banner advertising based on impressions though.
We usually recommend display advertising for one main goal – when you want to build brand recollection pretty far up in the sales funnel. Banner advertising is a great way of getting people to know and remember your brand.
Don’t try to use banner advertising to drive traffic to your site, though, because you’re usually going to be looking at a very costly exercise.

Video Advertising

A heck of a lot of video is consumed online on a daily basis. You can hijack some of these videos by inserting your video before whatever the audience you’re trying to target was going to watch.
It’s a more expensive medium than simple banner advertising, but gives you the opportunity to get a similar effect as TV advertising. Remember that on Youtube, for example, viewers can skip the ad after about 5 seconds, so you have to make sure that you start telling a compelling story immediately, otherwise viewers will just press “skip”.

Search Advertising

Most people’s buying journeys start with a search nowadays. If you can get your product or service in front of your potential customers at this phase in the buying cycle then you have a much better chance of converting them into customers.
Google understood this first (and best). Look where they are now. This tells you something – search advertising is effective, and companies are willing to pay a lot for spots at the top of search results.
You can’t buy your way to the top of search results organically, but you can buy your way to the top via search engine advertising. And how do you do this? By bidding the highest for the spot in particular. Google (and other search engines) have a “mini auction” every time somebody runs a search. This sees the highest bidder getting the first spot for that particular search result.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising works in pretty much the same way as display advertising does, but there’s an added dimension – the social aspect.
Even though the concept is pretty much the same – you’re placing an ad in front of an audience based on their media consumption (as opposed to a specific search), you have two main advantages.
The first advantage is that most social media advertising is native. It is presented in the same format as all other content, so a news feed advert on my news feed in Facebook will look exactly like the photo of my school-friend-I-haven’t-actually-seen-in-10-years’ new chubby baby. This means I’m primed to consume the content because I’m already in “reading mode” when the ad is served to me (unlike banner advertising, which usually lives outside the content on sites).
The second is that it is, yes, you guessed it: social. So if my best friend likes a restaurant and that restaurant runs an advertising campaign on Facebook, it can specify that the advert should only be served to friends of its customers. That way I see an ad in context – so I know that someone I trust has already vetted this restaurant, making it an implicit recommendation.

Retargeting

Retargeting is more complicated to set up and to achieve, but it is gathering quite a bit of momentum in recent years. But what is it?
Simple retargeting works by building up an audience of people who have visited your site and serving them ads that are relevant to your brand. This can be done by advertising platforms which have a large network of advertising partners.
Have you ever searched for a product on a site like Amazon or Booking.com? You are usually followed around with this (or similar ads) for a few weeks. The ads are not simply re-targeted (where I get served an ad simply because I visited a particular website), but programmed to my behaviour.
So booking.com will not just advertise its service in general to me, it will push a hotel in the city I had just searched for. This is an even more complicated system of retargeting, one that re-targets to individuals, not just generic audiences.

Direct deals

Direct deals can be far more flexible. These depend largely on the publisher and can be a combination of all the advertising methods above and more. Some sites sell packages that go beyond regular advertising – including deals for content, sponsoring newsletters, “reviews”, and leads.
Direct deals also allow for a wider take-over of sites. Some sites allow you to take over the site completely, with a re-skin of the site based on the advertiser’s needs. This is a far more immersive experience, and if done well can actually be pretty effective.
Buying directly from sites also allows you to implement advertising technology that would be harder to achieve through a network – such as ads that push a whole site’s content down and start playing a video when a visitor clicks on them.
As we’ll see next week, direct deals are usually more expensive than using a third party medium such as a banner network, however you usually have as close to a guarantee as possible of highly targeted traffic.

What’s next?

This week we’ve seen the different ways in which you can spend your money online. We haven’t really gone into how you buy advertising though. How will you know what to spend, and where to spend it? And more importantly, how will you measure the success (or failure) of your campaigns?

Shameless plug

Most companies don’t really know where to start with online advertising, which is why we’re here to help. We plan out your spending in a way that brings you much more value for money. If you feel you’re missing out on your business’ online potential but don’t really know where to start, then just drop us a line and we’ll help you get much more bang for your buck.

The post Introduction to online advertising – Part 1 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Adidas

Probably my favourite World Cup ad yet – simple, combines the new and old superstars of the sport but puts them in a situation that 99% of football fans can relate to. Adidas also created an advert for the Brazuca, the World Cup’s official ball. I love that they used a Kinks song and the shots from the point of view of the ball. Still, I found it rather uninspiring in comparison to some of the other ads around at the moment.

Beats

Beats went all out with their campaign, with a mini-movie that tries to tie in the top people from the sport with fans in Brazil. While I must admit that they did a marvellous job with the video, their attempt is trying too hard to be a Nike ad from a few years ago. And I dislike the whole thing of players arriving at a match with those massive headphones, it just highlights the individualism that seems to be ruining the sport nowadays.

Nike

And Nike, well, Nike are out there making the adverts that Nike should be making. I challenge you to watch this ad and not feel as if you want the World Cup to start tomorrow (oh, wait). It also wins bonus points for being reminiscent of the greatest football ad ever made (as judged by me). And because Nike can’t just have one advertising concept, there is an ad with the players themselves, not CG versions of them, even though it plays on them being someone else anyway.

Kia

Kia seem to have finally understood that having an athlete on top of a mountain is not the best way to sell cars. You need someone who looks good (check), a good concept (check) and great execution (check). This series of adverts might actually make inroads in the US, which is becoming more football(soccer)-savvy in recent years.

DirecTV

We might not be familiar with the brand over here, but DirecTV produced a brilliant TV Ad to promote its coverage of Brasil 2014. It was directed by Oliver Stone and features Oliver Stone himself, David Luiz, Sergio Aguero and Radamel Falcao.

Pepsi

Pepsi’s ad is probably what Beats’ commercial should have tried to be. It integrated music, football and the sugary drink perfectly. It included stars without them feeling as if they were out of place (with the exception of Messi, I think he always looks super uncomfortable in ads). The music builds up beautifully and the location feels super-authentic.

And some others…

Google is preparing for the World Cup by building a minisite that shows some of the greatest street art in Brazil. Sony advertised their Xperia with an ad that feels about as authentic as a remake of Casablanca featuring Tom Cruise would be.

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