Frank: Frank: Welcome to this week's episode of Casual Fridays. I'm Frank and today we'll be talking about legendary ad campaigns that we didn't even know were ads. Our first campaign, Oprah's car giveaway from 2004. Now, most people are probably familiar with this, it already has it's own page on knowyourmeme. Big giveaways like this are now par for the course in daytime TV but when Oprah first dropped 276 Pontiac G6s on her audience, nothing like this had ever been done before. The exposure for GM was enormous. Not only did she rave about the car the entire episode, but the buzz surrounding the event was picked up on media outlets all over the country. Alas, this is the only campaign on our list that doesn't have a happy ending. After an initial jump in sales, this stunt, that cost GM $7.7 million, wasn't enough to save Pontiac from going under.
There's no reason to feel bad because today, everyone in our studio audience is getting a brand new iPhone! You get an iPhone, and you get an iPhone and you get an iPhone. We don't have any iPhones? What did I just throw, empty boxes?
Our second campaign is Red Bull Stratus. Okay, this is just f‐‐‐‐ng insane. I used to get a doctor's note so I wouldn't have to climb the rope in gym class and this guy's jumping from outer space? The craziest thing? Red Bull sponsored this maniac, jumping from outer space. You can see him flopping around at 800 miles an hour. But the campaign worked. Not only did Red Bull sales increase 7% to over $1.6 billion, but more people watched this than the London Olympics. Stratus was the personification of their motto "Red Bull gives you wings" and this was a brilliant, albeit expensive way for them to follow through perfectly on their brand positioning.
There's no easy segue from death‐defying lunatic to beer, so let's just move on. When we first started talking about this topic, this next campaign popped right into my head. When I was a 20‐something walking on the campus of the University at Buffalo, I fell into three college clichés. One, I played guitar at parties. Two, I gained the freshman 50. Three, I decorated my dorm room with beer bottles. Not your typical beer bottles, the legendary Molson Canadian twin‐label bottles. They don't actually sell those anymore but I still thought having a beer here would help tell the story.
Molson at the time had a minuscule market share in the US and there's no way they could compete with Anheuser‐Busch on marketing dollars so they had to get creative. Crispin Porter created alternate messages for every bottle with a raunchy, but funny message. The alternate messages reached a total number of about 230 and sales jumped over 40% in just one year. Some of the most memorable labels were "I wish I was partying. Oh wait, I am partying," and "How 'bout that local sports team?" And "Tryouts to meet my parents."
Episode 2 - Legendary Ads We Didn't Know Were Ads
Sometimes, an ad is so good you don’t even know it’s an ad. This week, Frank Conjerti, Quinlan's creative director, takes a trip down memory lane. He'll review some of the biggest industry success stories of the 21st century that didn’t actually feel like ad campaigns ... until we found ourselves making a Molson run while driving a Pontiac and swigging a Red Bull.
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