It’s summer. It’s hot. Every day, all day. Good god, when will it end?
Look, summer’s great. Arguable, it’s the best season. The beaches, the pools, the barbecues, and vacations? Can’t beat that. But in the northeast, there’s really only two seasons: A hot, humid summer that lasts from about June to October, and a bone chilling winter that goes from November to April. May is a toss up, nobody knows what will happen.
But if you’re still suffering through the massive heat wave that’s taken over just about every town in the U.S., here’s something to take your mind off the hot and humid weather: a roundup of our favorite content marketing examples so far this summer!
1. IKEA brings “me” and “we” together.
Let’s start with a classic content format, the TV ad spot. In a new commercial for Swedish audiences, the furniture store uses opera in perhaps the best way seen since the last Mission: Impossible movie. Different groups of people sing “me” and “we” as if they were in Turandot, struggling between the desire for privacy and the need to stick together.
It’s a great ad, impeccably shot and acted, and it shows everything the brand is about: the ability to attain great living spaces without breaking the bank. At the same time, IKEA announced pop-up catalog locations in major cities—something to look forward to after the sweltering months.
2. Vodafone promotes social causes.
June was Pride month, which the UK telecommunications company celebrated with rainbow-tinged pics and GIFs on its Instagram account. That’s smart. If you want to attract the attention and trust of millennial users—the biggest, most influential group of buyers around—use the platforms where they hang out and (genuinely!) care about the same things they do. Vodafone went a few steps further, too. It also provided a free app that taps into your phone’s processing power to support cancer research while you sleep, and it got Star Wars and Pacific Rim star John Boyega to promote it.
The takeaway here? Millennials love Instagram, important social issues, and John Boyega. Maybe you can’t tap FN-2187 for your brand awareness efforts, but you can certainly find a cause to fight for to help make the world a little better and raise your reputation trustworthiness at the same time.
3. Blendtec destroys an Echo.
Summertime means summer foods and snacks—smoothies, pina coladas, marinades for steaks, that kind of thing. For tasty delights like those you need a blender. A really, really, ridiculously powerful blender. A blender like a blender from Blendtec.
Blendtec has been making hilarious videos on YouTube for 11 years now and although their output has slowed down, they still have over 800,000 subscribers and regularly get hundreds of thousands of views per video. Sometimes a few million.
In a cross-promotional event with Amazon for Amazon Prime Day, the fearless star of the Blendtec videos, Tom, disintegrates an Amazon Echo. Try to watch this video, which demonstrates the fearsome power of a blender, only once. It’s so strangely satisfying to watch the cylindrical AI bite the dust (note to future survivors of the robot uprising: sorry). And like a pro, Tom follows up with the requisite call-to-action, the “Like, share, subscribe, and follow on other channels” every video host worth their salt should include in their content.
According to LinkedIn, 62 percent of B2B marketers think video should be the primary platform of creators. If you’re an off-the-cuff brand like Blendtec, seriously consider it.
4. Wario takes over Nintendo’s social media accounts.
Wario is the rude, scheming, onion-eating doppelganger of Mario, everyone’s favorite turtle-stomping plumber. To promote WarioWare Gold, a compilation of past WarioWare games for the aging Nintendo 3DS, the grinning lightning-bolt-moustache’d mascot commandeered the video game maker’s social media channels, taunting users and the world at large with narcissistic tweets.
It’s a weird tack, and maybe not all that different from your average self-absorbed Twitter user (hey-o!) but it worked. The social media account stayed in-character for several hours one August afternoon and routinely received hundreds of replies and tens of thousands of likes and retweets for a game on an outdated-yet-still-trucking system that otherwise might have gone unnoticed in the slow summer months.
Got any of your favorite content and marketing campaigns? Share them with us in the comments below!