If you want a glimpse of the future of advertising, you might have to go on a scavenger hunt.
Last year, tens of thousands of Canadians spent much of November doing just that: nosing around on Google Street View, following FourSquare, riding Twitter feeds and Facebook, and pointing their smartphones at abstract squiggles on posters around Toronto, all in hopes of piecing together clues. Their bounty? One of three oversized red M&M candies – each about the size of a child’s head – that had been hidden around Toronto and captured by Google’s cameras when the search giant sent its Street View car around the city early the previous year.
One of the lucky candy fans-turned-detectives who found the M&Ms drove away in a red Smart Car. But, in the manner of such things, the biggest winners were Mars Canada, the domestic subsidiary that owns the M&M brand, and Proximity Canada, the advertising agency that devised the game. Capping a string of awards for the campaign, including three Lions at the Cannes advertising festival in June, last Friday Proximity picked up the top prize at the Canadian Marketing Association’s annual black-tie gala, winning the Best of the Best honour.
After years of “digital advertising” meaning viral videos and brazen grabs for “Likes” on Facebook, the M&Ms effort was not only a canny mix of different media, but also a nimble program that responded to real-world events in real time.
And as more brands take tentative steps toward becoming so-called publishers of their own content – the better to engage customers in relationships rather than just sell to them – the campaign demonstrated both the promise and limitations of those aspirations.
“There’s a huge craving for ‘different’ right now,” observed Stephen Brown, president of Toronto’s Fuse Marketing and the strategic chair of the CMA awards. For many years, he said, campaigns were built around a great TV spot. “This campaign sort of laughed at that and said: ‘We’ll do things differently.’ ”
And did so successfully: a case study video claims the average time spent on the contest site was 19 minutes, “four times the industry average.”
That’s all the more remarkable considering the M&Ms effort didn’t spend a dime on so-called paid media – the term usually referring to television, newspapers, and magazine advertising. Rather, it targeted its audience where they spend most of their time: on social media, and out on the street. “It’s very reflective of the fact that, in marketing right now, it’s all open season,” said Mr. Brown. “That’s making everyone challenge their usual marketing media strategy and say, ‘It has to be customized based on the product and the target we’re going after.’”
As that open season has taken hold and companies have become smarter both about how to target their markets and where – and where not – to spend their money, some nimble digital agencies have feasted. Proximity, which is in the Omnicom network of companies, opened in 2005 and already has about 175 employees, up more than 80 per cent in the past year.
Coincidentally, a very similar – and much larger – campaign had launched only a few weeks beforehand, out of the U.S. Devised by the hot independent New York-based agency Droga5, that campaign also used a digital landscape for a scavenger hunt, asking fans of singer Jay-Z to search Microsoft’s Bing for clues to where they could find larger-than-life versions of each page that made up his forthcoming biography – in the non-virtual world. All 320 pages of the book, Decoded, were planted in 13 cities around the globe: on restaurant tablecloths, on the bottom of a swimming pool in Los Angeles, on the heavy bag in a boxing club, in the London Underground.
The effort won 3 awards at Cannes, including the Integrated Grand Prix, the festival's biggest honour.
