Marketing I'm Obsessed With: Wild Virtual Experiences
Virtual out-of-home (OOH, i.e. billboards, experiential) experiences are taking the marketing world by storm. Or maybe I should say by surprise? I’ll admit that as a digital marketer, I can get blinders on. I sometimes get to thinking that traditional marketing is dead, and brands should stop spending their money there. Then, the universe always seems to take me by the hand and show me why I’m wrong.
It’s done this for me a couple of times lately, and boy has my head been turned. Most recently, the one that got the internet really talking was the Maybelline Sky High Mascara. The internet was abuzz with the video of a London bus and the tube (pun definitely intended) adorned with eyelashes driving through a literally sky-high mascara wand (see photo above). I, among many others, sent this to colleagues with various messages of, “This is so brilliant! What a great piece!”
And yet, in a time of dwindling budgets and fears of a recession, we should’ve known better. It turns out, the whole thing was digital only! How? Well, everything was animated, as one of the Maybelline marketing team members shared on their TikTok once the piece had gone viral.
Now, I’m not the first to write about this or notice this trend, and I won’t be the last, but as we face the need to be more creative in order to stop scrolling, this almost made me admire them more. Not only had Maybelline found a way to trick all of us into wanting to go out and find these pieces, they’d found an economical way to do it, too! They made a bigger impact than if they’d gone traditional and bought things like bus carousels and billboards, and a bigger splash socially than if they’d gone the influencer marketing route (which there is totally a time and place for).
I know I said earlier that this wasn’t about Barbie, but maybe it is, as they also took advantage of this trend and “bought out” the front of the Burj Khalifa digitally to create a video of a giant-sized original Barbie coming out of her box and walking next to the building. It was so convincing to some that now Twitter (sorry, X) puts a warning below it saying “Context matters: This is a CGI ad campaign.” They took the opposite approach, doing everything they could to get the world talking about all things Barbie, and wow did it pay off, making it the biggest movie ever directed by a woman and beating Oppenheimer at the box office opening weekend. In a world where the goal is to stop a scroll, they’ve won.
Again, we were all fooled, it turns out this wasn’t a part of the official campaign, but at this point it didn’t matter—whether it was or wasn’t, it is in people’s minds marketing for the movie. Why would someone want to give them free marketing? Now the studio that created it is highly sought after. So they gave the movie some free marketing, and they got even more in return.
Both of these campaigns played on one idea: our willingness to believe. We all wanted to believe that these campaigns were real. In the case of Barbie, WB spent at recent estimates $150 million in marketing, more than it cost to make the whole movie. We all believed that maybe they had gone that big. In the case of Maybelline, we all thought, “This is so smart it has to be real.” And now I see, whether these were only digital or actually in person, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Both showed that ingenuity won the day. And isn’t that the real win?
Lesson Learned: Quiet your inner critic and try that wild idea you have, it may just work.
