@MisterMumble’s favourite social media

campaigns of 2012

Nike:No surprises here - Nike, one of my favourite brands, didn’t need to sponsor the Olympics. Instead it ran an outstanding ambush campaign, avoiding LOCOG issues throughout.

A new minimalistic ad was introduced each day, telling the story of an individual striving for greatness. Not an athlete, but an individual based in cities called London all over the world.

The video of 12 year old Nathan Sorrell from London, Ohio has been viewed more than 1.5m times. The original ad, featuring Londons around the world, more than 5.3m times.

Nike’s Facebook base grew by 166,718 during the Olympics – more than double the growth of Olympic sponsor Adidas, which netted 80,761 new fans.

Tweets mentioning Nike and The Olympics surpassed 16,000, while Adidas narrowly exceeded 9,000.

Dollar Shave ClubMarch 2012 saw a new competitor enter the shaving market: an Australian brand which claimed to have “f**king great” products.

Its no-nonsense ad inviting users to leave the big brands behind and join the Dollar Shave Club has been viewed more than 8.4m times.

Within the first 48 hours from launch, 12,000 people had joined the club. Not bad for an ad that cost less than $5k to make.

The Dollar Shave Club currently has more than 65,000 Facebook likes and 22,000 Twitter followers.

Red Bull StratosPerhaps one of the most ambitious campaigns of all time. Stratos had me sitting on the edge of my couch watching the jump on the news, with Red Bull’s live feed on my laptop.

Felix Baumgartner broke numerous records, with 8 million people watching the live stream.

The Red Bull YouTube channel attracted 87,801 new subscribers during the jump dates, compared to an average daily growth of 2,142 new subscribers per day .

October 14th saw more than 900,000 interactions on the Red Bull Stratos Facebook page, while the Red Bull official page was slightly less at 740,000.

I also loved the Red Bull ‘Athlete Machine’ video, posted in November, which has more than 13m views.

Heineken: One Like, One BalloonHeineken’s Brazilian office had some fun with its Facebook presence, blowing up a green balloon every time someone liked the Heineken Brazil page.

“Um Like Um Balao” launched on 11th January and was live for just one day.

The end result: Thousands of likes and a room full of Balloons. A quirky campaign but a great bit of fun from the beer of Bond.

Absolut InspireA slightly lesser-known campaign from the Swedish vodka brand.

Absolut Inspire was the next step from Absolut’s Blank campaign, which saw bottles customised by artists around the world.

Inspire used Google Maps to create an augmented reality street art app, “designed to create a new world without creative limitations”.

It let users of the app create street art on any building around the world. Below are a few great examples.

Israel Anti-Drug AuthorityThe Israel Anti-Drug Authority launched a campaign to prevent the use of hard drugs among 18-24 year olds.

The campaign made great use of Facebook’s Timeline feature – both the campaign and Timeline launched in January.

The Anti-Drugs Authority introduced Adam Barak, the character who’s life we would follow in a split-screen layout. The left, his life on drugs, and the right, his life without.

Not only did the campaign generate awareness in Israel, it received worldwide press, with “hundreds of thousands” of tweets, shares and likes generated on Facebook and Twitter.

@SwedenTechnically this is a campaign which shouldn’t be featured, as it started in December 2011. However, it was during 2012 that it really gathered momentum, so I wanted to take a look at it.

Sweden was the first country in the world to hand over its national official Twitter account to its residents. The account features a new user every week, with the target of them sharing recommendations and opinions. However, some featured residents took a very different route.

While some stuck to the brief, others used it as a way of promoting their own work, sharing their rants and generally mocking others. Was this a bad thing though?

When the campaign launched, @Sweden had 5,000 followers. Today it has more than 65k followers and has won several awards.

It has been an innovative campaign which has been very controversial at times, but despite this it has attracted followers from around the world, graced the likes of New York Times and Mashable, while also inspiring accounts like @WeAreAustralia, @PeopleOfTheUk and @TweetweekUSA.

Grey Poupon: Society of Good TasteThis was a popular campaign in the Yomego office, and one for which I had to rely on others to see the ‘behind the scenes’ content.

Would-be fans of Grey Poupon had their Facebook profile checked to see “whether their proper use of grammar, taste in art, restaurant check-ins, books read and movies selected combine for a score high enough to merit membership in the Grey Poupon ‘Society of Good Taste.’” (I didn’t make the cut)

While brands are racing to expand their followers, Grey Poupon was doing the opposite, looking to select key influencers and those who they feel will engage with the page more often. The campaign attracted worldwide coverage and accepted just 38,836 members to its society.

Melbourne Metro – Dumb Ways To DieAustralia's metro system saw a number of unfortunate accidents towards the end of last year, so decided to use social to raise awareness to the dangers at rail lines.

The fun and catchy ad, featuring a series of jelly-bean characters dying in daft ways, went viral and was viewed 26.6m times in a week. It has now been viewed more than 38m times (that’s more than the entire Australian population).

The campaign works so well; it features a catchy song, its not personal or location-specific and its very funny. All of which is quite surprising for a rail safety campaign.

The song is available for download on iTunes and the campaign extends to Tumblr and an interactive site (below), while it will also be rolled out across Australia in the near future.

The best of the rest…

And a few that missed the mark…