Published on
April 15, 2024
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Welcome to the Breakdown, a weekly roundup of the best real-life marketing examples, created for marketers and agency folk that want to create work that actually works.
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The guilty peek before the guilty indulgence.
It’s common practice to peek out of your window or at your delivery app to make sure you know the second your food arrives at your front door. You try to mask your impatience and hunger-induced irritation with a curious look, or a raised eyebrow.
That’s what this new set of OOH from McDonald’s focuses on. The moment of anticipation before your food gets delivered. All to continue raising awareness for McDelivery, this campaign is rather like the new British Airways OOH. Rather than look out of the window to the “product”, look in through the window to see the consumer. There’s a clever metaphor to be hashed out there.
The creative has been executed really well - somehow, you don’t get the sense that these people are annoyed by how late their food is. They look like they’ve just ordered from the McApp (not the real name) and have already lunged for the window, in anticipation for something they simply cannot wait for.
McDonald’s are not the first to do something like this. Last year, Uber Eats released a campaign about the weird things people do with their saved cooking time as they wait for a food delivery in “Do Less.” But that doesn’t make it a bad campaign. Far from it. An incredibly simple insight about how consumers behave when they use the product. An incredibly simple message about the product itself. Job done.
A product/consumer insight that stretches for years - even decades.
Beko have launched a new campaign called the Beko Inheritance. The driving idea is that particular household appliances are the source of family arguments, when it comes to deciding who will inherit them at the demise of the original owner.
The TV ad is a 72-second cutdown of the entire plotline of the 2019 Daniel Craig-led film Knives Out, with a posh family in a posh estate arguing over the legacy of what turns out to be a fridge.
There’s also a website where you can generate your own bequeathment document for your own home appliances. Though that side of things feels a bit rushed…
This is a great campaign. It’s fun and silly, but focuses on two things very well. The consumer behaviour is spot on (everyone has had a moment when they’re eyeing up one of their parents’ possessions, wondering when it will be theirs). And the message is clear - Beko appliances are of such good quality and so eternally reliable that they’ll be written into a will. And argued about by a bunch of entitled children and usurers.
Another inventive execution riffing on love and hate.
There are some great Marmite effectiveness papers that have been written over the decades. I’d be surprised if there isn’t one about the long-term creative impact of the more recent work founded upon the brand’s “Love It or Hate It” slogan.
In this new campaign, Marmite is recruiting Brits to smuggle the stinky yeast extract to the US by any means necessary, so that the 100k plus British expats in New York can once again enjoy the salty spread. The brand has plastered dodgy posters and stickers featuring a phone number to call to see how you can become a smuggler yourself.
There’s a similarly mysterious and bare web page for the campaign, but it’s the campaign film that ties it together. Shot and edited like an investigative Channel 4 documentary, there are pixelated faces and modulated voices to hide the identities of the Marmite criminal underbelly.
As silly and hyperbolic as this campaign may be, it’s based on a real insight. Brits abroad do struggle to find Marmite, and many “smuggle” it in suitcases when they travel. Marmite even launched a “hand luggage friendly” 70g jar in 2015, based on the same insight. But silly and hyperbolic it is. No complaints here… remember the Pack Yer Bags campaign from Yorkshire Tea last year?
“Love it or hate it” is one of those creative ‘ideas’ that just keeps giving. Marmite’s job is not consistency of execution, but of experience - all campaigns that start with this idea are headed to the same place, but find new and dangerous ways of getting there. From hypnosis to neglect and now to smugglers, they never seem to run out of new ways to drive love (or hate?) for the brand.