15 Most Ingenious Online Campaigns...

In advertising, you usually spend all your time looking for the hot, the new, the next. But sometimes it’s good to look back, to appreciate the old that was once new, to see how far we’ve come.

To celebrate our 150th issue, shots takes a nostalgic trip and browses the industry’s rich creative history to pick our favourite 150 agencies, directors, production and post houses, spots, Super Bowl spots, creative gurus, brands, music videos, online campaigns, shots staff most admired work and most important changes.

Agent Provocateur Proof

CDP London, 2001

Admittedly this spot was initially made for the cinema, but it’s hard not to acknowledge it as a force in the world of online advertising. In the nascent days of the internet, bandwidth was an issue (that’s if you even had access) but this spot, directed by Steve Reeves through CDP London, starring a scantily clad Kylie Minogue riding a bucking bronco, was one of the first to be shared electronically. Lo-res QuickTime may have been the format of choice, but it helped advertisers realise there was something in this ‘online sharing’ thing.

ASOS Urban Tour

BBH London, 2011

To promote online fashion retailer ASOS’ new menswear range BBH and Stinkdigital created an interactive online film experience that showcased street dancers performing in a warehouse in London. Zooming in on the various dancers, users could stop time to check out the clothes, at which point the dancer in question breaks out of the dance routine to model the clothes in more detail and allow users to add the clothes to their shopping basket. Urban Tour was clever, ambitious and beautifully produced.

Bing/Jay-Z Decoded

Droga5 New York, 2010

Connecting search engine Bing’s search and map functionalities and rapper Jay-Z’s autobiography launch, this campaign marries traditional outdoor with a more contemporary digital approach. Uniquely designed pages of Jay-Z’s book were placed in different, relevant places around the US and further afield, then an integrated online game tied everything together by giving fans clues to the locations of the pages, enabling them to win them. 

BMW The Hire

Fallon Minneapolis, 2001

First released in 2001, The Hire was at the forefront of digital advertising. A series of short films starring Clive Owen as The Driver, the shorts were directed by feature film luminaries including John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai and John Woo. Created by Fallon Minneapolis and David Fincher’s Anonymous Content, the films were a huge success and showed that if the content was rich enough, people would spend time watching it.

Burger King Subservient Chicken

Crispin Porter + Bogusky Miami, 2004

Created by The Barbarian Group and CP+B, this campaign is one of the first that ventures into audience participation. Customers could log onto the Subservient Chicken website and see a man in a chicken suit inside a room. Typing in commands allowed you to ‘control’ the chicken and make him perform, allowing you to ‘have it your way’ – the brand’s slogan. A follow-up film was released this year for the Chicken Big King sandwich.

Burger King Whopper Sacrifice

Crispin Porter + Bogusky Miami, 2009

Burger King’s second entry on this list is for a campaign that brilliantly utilised social media and turned the idea of adding to your list of online friends on its head. Asking people to sacrifice a selection of their Facebook friends to win a free Whopper, the campaign was both hugely successful and somewhat controversial. After Facebook intervened, asking Burger King to alter the campaign, the client decided instead to pull it, but not before it had had an immediate online impact.

Dove Evolution

Ogilvy Canada, 2006

Recent Dove campaigns such as Real Beauty Sketches have been huge hits, but Dove Evolution paved the way for the brand to have real conversations about real women. Created by Ogilvy Canada, the viral film showed how much time, effort and digital trickery went into making one woman the model ‘face’ of a fictional beauty brand and, like all culturally relevant ideas, has been parodied countless times.

Ecko Unltd Still Free

Droga5 New York, 2006

This viral film tricked some news outlets into believing it was real on its release in 2006. The grainy, handheld footage seemed to show two men ‘tagging’ Air Force One. Newly formed agency Droga5, director Randy Krallman and clothing brand Ecko Unltd were behind the stunt. It was a piece of online work that delivered in spades and which highlighted the power of cleverly made online films.

HBO Voyeur

BBDO New York, 2007

A hugely ambitious project to celebrate the storytelling of HBO, this campaign utilised experiential, online, TV and mobile to showcase a series of interwoven stories. An outdoor, projection mapping event in New York led to online content with clues and links to other stories and characters. An epic, multi-platform execution.

IKEA Facebook Showroom

Forsman & Bodenfors Gothenburg, 2009

To promote the opening of a new IKEA store in Malmo, F&B decided to ‘kidnap’ the tag function on Facebook. They created a Facebook profile for the store’s manager and uploaded 12 showrooms to his photo album. The person who tagged their name to a product first won it and had their win, and IKEA’s brand, in their newsfeed, further promoting the scheme. Simple but effective.

Intel/Toshiba The Beauty Inside

Pereira & O’Dell San Francisco, 2012

An ingenious set of online films, directed by Drake Doremus, which, through online interaction and auditioning, allowed viewers to play the film’s lead role. Aired in six weekly episodes, the clever and emotional films starred well-known actors, including Topher Grace, and hundreds of audience members, garnering tens of millions of views.

Metro Trains Dumb Ways to Die

McCann Melbourne, 2012

The most recent campaign on our list but also, in awards terms, one of the most successful. Crowned the most awarded ad in Cannes Lions history in 2013, the online film and associated advertising elements dominated award shows last year. The simple but hugely effective animation and the mind-bogglingly catchy tune made it almost impossible to ignore, no matter how hard you tried… all together now; “Duuuumb ways to di-ie, so many dumb ways to di-ie…”

Old Spice Responses

Wieden+Kennedy Portland, 2010

While the original TV spot, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, kicked the whole Old Spice revival off, the Responses campaign cemented it as one of the most successful – and clever – in online history. Allowing consumers to interact with Old Spice Guy (Isaiah Mustafa) through YouTube via questions posed on social media channels, the campaign garnered 5.9 million views on the first day of its release in 2010.

T-Mobile Dance

Saatchi & Saatchi London, 2009

A film that started a trend for hidden camera/the-public-as-stars campaigns, this spot was a massive hit when it came out and, like it or loathe it, garnered a huge amount of press – both industry and national – as well as a YouTube viewer count that stretches into the tens of millions. Job done.

Trojan Condoms’ Trojan Games Vault, Weightlifting, Judo

The Viral Factory London, 2004

One of the earliest examples of brilliant, TV-unsuitable-but-online-perfect content is this series of films for Trojan condoms. Clever spoofs of Olympic sports, the films mined the early ‘sex sells’ route of online marketing without being crude.