Searching for a new way to promote a brand or product?

It can be hard sometimes to find inspiration for a new PR campaign, especially if it is a well known brand or someone you have been working with for some time.

We’ve come up with a batch of offbeat, zany and unusual ideas that are worth considering if you want something different.

Different types of marketing

Mattress technology company – Purple opted for a pair of comedians to host an hilarious web series entitled Purple Boys. Each episode involved fictional characters struggling to get to sleep in various entertaining ways. Information about Purple mattresses was unobtrusively woven into the script, resulting in an eventual good night’s sleep on a Purple mattress.

Skittles – decided to promote its brand by creating a musical that made fun of advertising. Broadway the Rainbow set out to show just how manipulative the marketing and advertising industries could be. Characters lived in a giant Skittles commercial, and were determined to show how advertising had ruined their lives. Never shown on TV or online, the show was only available to paying customers. Although tickets cost $200 each, it became a sell out success and a social media viral sensation. USA Today described it as ‘the most inventive end run in the history of ambush advertising”..

Few retailers would ever dream of highlighting its customers weird and wonderful shopping lists on Twitter – but GoPuff did just that and succeeded in gaining massive publicity. An American company, GoPuff allows users to order convenience store items through its app. It chose to base a Twitter marketing campaign on the strange items that people were ordering usually late at night. Typical messages included ‘To the lady who just ordered three packs of Benadryl: We Feel You Girl “

Nivea – A drone disguised as a seagull was used to squirt Nivea sunscreen on unsuspecting kids as part of a video showing how all kids can be protected from the sun even if they refuse to apply sunscreen. When the film launched at Cannes in 2016, the resultant headlines were quite eyecatching for example : Seagull drone poops sunscreen …… uh, thanks (CNet) . Judges at the award initially thought it was a Monty Python film.

Milka – Swiss brand Milka Chocolate devised a very cunning way to launch itself onto the French market. They simply removed one square from 13 million of its classic milk chocolate bars. Consumers buying the chocolate were given a choice: Do you want to send the last square to your loved one – or should it be sent to you? All they had to do was enter their appropriate choice online, along with a personalised message or simply put their name & address to receive the missing piece themselves.

Tiger Beer – Singapore based Tiger Beer set out to find a way to turn air pollution into something useful. Working with scientists, it created a method by which air pollution could be turned into black ink. A group of street artists gleefully used the resultant rich black ink into a series of art works emphasising the scale of air pollution and of course, the value of drinking Tiger Beer.

Uber – Sitting in traffic jams within busy cities can be time consuming and annoying. Uber set out to entertain while promoting their service in Mexico City. A small army of drones was sent out bearing signs promoting UberPOOL to fly over cars caught up in long queues of traffic. It was as stunt that raised smiles, lots of publicity and media attention.

Is this the longest advertisement possible? It could well be since it lasts three and a half hours! Amazingly this ad for Laphroaig Whiskey was filmed in just one take. All it involves is a comedian reading real reviews of Laphroaig Whiskey using a filibuster style speech. Nor were all the reviews good ones – many were downright disgusted with the product, while others were somewhat mixed in their attitudes. The aim was to show just how polarised views can be about Laphroaig and that all were acceptable.

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