In January, Lynx launched their ‘Get in there’ campaign with a host of apps you can download to your phone to make it look like a harmonica, sound like a spray or, best of all, turn it into a ‘fit girl finder’.
You can make your phone click like a geiger counter and pretend it has been programmed to search out only really hot babes. This little bit of instant theatre gives you permission to start chatting up girls. In other words, it helps you ‘get in there’.
This interactivity means the brand has moved from simply telling angst-ridden teenagers it can help to becoming genuinely useful. The brand is repositioning itself as every teenager boy’s good mate.
The Royal Navy has been doing something similar, providing a useful, if unexpected, service with its ‘Get the Message’ viral. The way this works is, you go to www.getthemessage.net and write an e-mail to a friend which then gets delivered in video form. It’s funny to have a message about something completely trivial like ‘see you in the pub at 6’ delivered by a lantern-jawed helicopter pilot. It’s a neat way of telling teenagers that there is a greater breadth of careers in the Navy than they may have supposed but without actually lecturing them about it.
However, the most awarded idea in mobile marketing to date is the campaign for Volkswagen spare parts in Germany. The message sets out to warn teenagers that if they don’t use VW-manufactured parts for their ageing Golfs, then they must expect to pay the consequences.
A viral film was seeded in a number of sites showing an elderly couple having dinner. The cuckoo clock whirrs into action but instead of a cuckoo, out pops a little black rapper who sings ‘Yo muthafuckah, yo.’
The viral sent viewers on to a microsite where they could download the rap as a ringtone. You could argue that that is being useful. Now, when the nation’s youth talk to each other, on buses, trams and trains, around 100,000 phones start muttering ‘yo muthafuckah’ daily.
This is progress.
/Patrick Collister/
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