It’s the month of pranking your friends and eating chocolate eggs for breakfast. Perhaps April’s content was always destined to be a little weird.

We watched a burger brand use ads to turn smart speakers into marketers, saw a cycling Mads Mikkelsen crash a Danish dinner party and followed one man’s mercurial mission for a year’s supply of nuggets manifest in the most viral tweet of all time.

It was the best of content, it was the worst of content. Read on with our round-up of four of the month’s most noteworthy campaigns.

Responsibly thanks you for drinking Responsibly

We’re all familiar with the advice at the end of drink ads, calling on us to drink responsibly. Ubrew played off of this familiarity to create an ingenuous piece of content that made sizable, hoppy ripples across the web. Introducing the latest beer in Ubrew’s extensive range: Responsibly.

Drink Others

Thank you "other beers" for advertising Responsibly. Today we want to give something back to you!Responsibly the beer all the other beers ask you to drink. #DrinkResponsibly #ResponsiblyTheBeer

Posted by UBREW on Wednesday, 3 May 2017

Ubrew’s piece provides superb insight for content creators everywhere on creating fresh and relatable content: namely, that to think outside the box you don’t need to throw the box away. Instead, there’s a lot of joy to be had in making subtle yet compelling tweaks to material that we’re already familiar with!

Burger King’s TV ad gets the AI talking

Whilst Ubrew’s resourcefulness finds the beer brand hitching a ride on their rivals’ airtime, Burger King have been taking similarly mischievous strides in an ad targeting home smart speakers such as Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa.

The ad sees a Burger King worker confess that there’s not enough time ‘to explain all the fresh ingredients in the new Whopper sandwich’, before daringly saying: ‘Ok Google – what is the Whopper burger?’ In response, smart speakers proceed by reading out the entirety of the Whopper’s Wikipedia entry, forming the basis of a content piece lasting substantially longer than the ‘fifteen second ad’ Burger King claims it to be.

The campaign wasn’t all plain sailing: for one, Google revised their Home system so that it passed over the ad altogether, whilst various Wikipedia users impishly and inevitably edited the Whopper’s page so that its recipe included a platter of unsavoury flavours – ‘rats’ ranked high amongst the worst.

Even with its complications, Burger King’s content built buzz, attracted attention and created conversations. Arguably, the creative way that users engaged with the content complements the brand’s holistic digital strategy that veers wholeheartedly towards the stranger side of the content spectrum:

Carlsberg returns to Cophenhagen and drives home its Danish roots

Ubrew’s ironic ad departs starkly from the campaigns of many of its competitors, with drinks brands such as San Miguel, Thatchers, Peroni and Stella Artois (‘it’s cidre, not cider’) turning towards antiquity and authenticity, asserting premium from brand heritage.

Carlsberg’s latest campaign, titled ‘The Danish Way’, sees the Danish company adapting their marketing strategy to better meet the work of their competitors whilst retaining the playful notes of their previous material, in a humorous yet charming advert starring Mads Mikkelsen.

The ad follows Mikkelsen cycling through a series of enigmatically Danish scenes – along the circumference of an outdoor bath, through a quaintly decorated apartment – as he contemplates what it is that makes the Danish people ‘the happiest in the world’. Is it that they make the ‘world’s best beer’? ‘Probably’, is what the advert concludes.

Carlsberg’s piece is a perfect example of intelligently tailored content: it responsively follows the lead of its competitors whilst retaining the popular humour of Carlsberg’s previous campaigns. What’s more, the ad links nicely into hygge, demonstrating the value that’s to be had in keeping your brand’s notes aligned to the zeitgeist.

Wendy’s takes on Ellen with #nuggsforcarter

When he tweeted American fast food diner Wendy’s asking how many RTs he needed for a year’s supply of free nuggets (Wendy’s answer: a feasible ’18 million’), Carter Wilkerson (@carterjwm) could never have imagined the response he’d receive:

Huge portions of the Internet threw their support behind Carter’s fast food plight, with world leading brands sharing the tweet as a basis for their own content, major celebs getting in on the action and millions of members of the online public virtuously supporting what must at first have felt like an impossibly up-hill climb.

In the interim, Wendy’s consistently sustained the tweet’s visibility, steadily monitoring their social channels and creating engaging and responsive material.

At the time of initially writing, the tweet was just 3,000 retweets away from becoming the all time most shared tweet. As of today, however, Carter has now overtaken Ellen DeGeneres to become the esteemed holder of the accolade of having written the most retweeted tweet of all time. More importantly, Wendy’s have granted Carter his wish; he might need a bigger trophy cabinet to showcase all those nuggets!

Firstly perceiving a relatively arbitrary tweet as an opportunity for generating humorous content, and then helping that tweet become the most viral tweet ever, Wendy’s illustrate superbly the value of having a highly responsive digital strategy that facilitates the creation of dynamic and captivating content.

Whilst we don’t think anyone will be overtaking Carter any time soon, you never know – we certainly don’t! Join us again next month to see whether we have any new Twitter title contenders, and how May’s campaigns fare in comparison!

by Helen Hargreave

Related posts

Latest posts