Favourite marketing campaigns of 2016

Every year, agencies, brands and companies produce brilliant marketing campaigns that win awards or just win our hearts. Here’s couple of them that we fell in love with in 2016.

Like a Girl

A brilliant campaign, and one of my favourite this year has been ‘Like a girl’ by Always. The aim of the campaign was to change the negative societal perception of girls doing sports. In their videos they interviewed young girls, showing what it means to do something ‘like a girl’. The campaign shows strong, self-confident and ready to fight girls, who are empowering not just their peers, but women around the world too.

Within the first month, the video had been shared 1 million times and Always received a UN award for the global impact the campaign had on female empowerment. So I guess we can say that the campaign had worked. Very well done, Always!

25,915 Days

That’s, apparently, the average number of days you have in your body. In their campaign Reebok are asking ‘how will you choose to #HonorYourDays?’

The company aims to inspire people to push our bodies to the physical limits as well as appreciate our bodies, as quite often we take them for granted. They launched the campaign with a beautifully produced video, portraying a woman’s relationship with running in reverse: showing her now, as an old lady, and moving back to her childhood. It shows how Reebok caters for all your challenges in life, no matter how old you are.

They created a dedicated web page, where you can calculate your days left to honour your body, as well as share photos of how you’re doing it. In my opinion, it perfectly communicated their brand mission, and inspired a lot of people – I want a pair of Reebok shoes now!

Cats take over London’s Clapham Common tube station

One of the funniest campaigns seen this year was a crowd funded project by the Citizen’s Advertising Takeover Service. According to James Turner, founder of the Glimpse Collective: “It’s a crowd funded campaign to replace 68 adverts in Clapham with pictures of cats and we hope that people will just come down, enjoy it, experience the station but more importantly think about how things that seem fixed and hard to change can be changed if people work together.”

Oh, and the cats in the ads are rescue cats from Cats Protection and Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. As for the cat lover – the campaign melts my heart. But it’s not just about the cats and fun. I think it’s really important to convince people that we can make a difference together; as the Brexit referendum and US election results show, there’s a lack of that nowadays.

Lidl Twitter campaign

Lidl launched their Christmas campaign this year on Twitter. Its principle was pretty basic, but very effective: the campaign allowed people to take control of the price for certain products by the strength of conversations on Twitter. So the more shoppers talked about the lobster, for example, the more its price would drop, driving down the original price of £5.99. Lidl wanted to give power back to consumers, and I think it worked perfectly.
The campaign not only generated brand awareness by attracting regular shoppers, but also engaged celebrities, such as ITV presenter and Made in Chelsea star Jeff Brazier.

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