"Will [heart] Kate" Post-its
The Cinderella wedding of the centur-zzzzzz. If you're among those bucking the exhaustion from getting up before dawn to watch the Royal wedding, eating celebratory crumpets, and clearing a space on your shelf for a new commemorative plate, you're not alone. The excitement goes beyond just the merch manufacturers. ($500 for a set of Kate Middleton dolls, anyone?) Marketers everywhere are cashing in on the goodwill. T-Mobile created a spoof wedding video with Royal look-alikes. And on Sunday, these giant "Will [heart]Kate" Post-its were plastered on billboards around London, with good wishes for the couple to "stick together forever." The campaign, created by OgilvyAction, will stick around for two weeks.
If you can't feel the love in person, there's always a cardboard cutout. As TV networks jostled for early-bird viewers of the festivities in London, CTV hyped its royal wedding coverage this week by transporting a bit of Buckingham to Canada. On Wednesday and Thursday, it unfurled a poster backdrop of the palace outside network headquarters in downtown Toronto. Passers-by could sample tea and have their pictures taken with life-sized replicas of Wills and Kate. It all took place under the watch of a couple of live models and actors posing as Queen's Guards, complete with bearskin hats and gloomy mugs that belied the ridiculousness of guarding a pair of celebrities made out of cardboard.
It was a quick and messy divorce, but now Aflac is just daffy for its new spokesmallard. In March, the insurance brand fired comedian Gilbert Gottfried - who for years voiced the famous "Aflac" quack for the duck mascot in commercials - after a series of jokes he wrote on Twitter about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Aflac launched a nationwide search to replace him, even releasing a silent-film-style ad to make the point that the duck had no voice. Out of more than 12,000 applicants, Aflac chose a radio sales manager from Minneapolis, Daniel McKeague. Aflac executives made the call next to a prominently displayed pair of flags, one American and one Japanese, as a reminder that insurers excel at their own damage control.
For a real marriage made in heaven, all you need is the marketing trend du jour paired with a website where people spend hours every day. This week, Facebook launched its new Deals service to rival e-commerce player Groupon, which offers daily deals to customers. As a social networking site, Facebook will focus on marketing group activities. It joins another Internet giant, Google, which is testing its new Offers service in Portland, Ore. So far, Facebook Deals is being launched in a handful of U.S. cities, but there are plans to expand it, according to company spokesperson Emily C. White. After it launched its mobile deals service last year, which gives coupons to places where users "check in" on Facebook using their phones (saying they're at Starbucks for example,) it expanded to Canada, among other countries.