Coca-Cola enters your subconscious with new print ads and Taco Bell opens a hotel.
Coca-Cola brings refreshing take to print ads
Dear readers, I want you to take a deep breath, raise your shoulders up to your ears, breath out and relax your shoulders, now, I don’t want you to think of a blue elephant.
Ok, hands up who of you pictured a blue elephant? Our brains work in funny ways; tell us not to think of something, and well you guessed it, we think of it. A new campaign out of Coca-Cola Europe adopts a similar technique. A series of static images featuring the line “try not to hear this”, challenges viewers to avoid playing the sounds in their heads.
“Coca-Cola is kind of making fun of you here, like, ‘Try not to hear this. Ha! You can’t,’” said Ricardo Casal, executive creative director of David Miami, the agency that developed the campaign for Coca-Cola. “That playfulness and cockiness is important for this idea because I think that nowadays, brands shouldn’t take themselves too seriously.”
Not many brand could pull off ads as evocative as this while showing such little branding. Only after years of brand building could work of this type work its way into consumers’ subconscious so much so that Coca-Cola can trigger an association by merely suggesting a sound.
Try your luck, try not to imagine what a blue elephant might sound like.
Would you stay at a Taco Bell Hotel?
Featuring guest rooms, themed water activities, nail salon, braiding station, Taco Bell hops and limited time menu dining options, Taco Bell will open a hotel in Palm Springs this August.
Having previously focused on experiences, travel, offering exclusive apparel and dining options, “Tacoasis” is the brands latest multi-channel brand-led marketing tactic designed to deliver an immersive way to celebrate the best of the brand and resonate with Millennials.
Reporting 6% growth in global sales for 2018, Taco Bell has been a strong performer for parent company YUM Brands and is proof that committing to a combined brand-led/sales marketing approach can reap rich rewards.
Tactics like this help brands stand out from the crowd by raising brand awareness and creating brand buzz on social channels:
Domino’s promised to help cities pave their potholes
KFC let customers create a custom video for Mother’s Day — featuring shirtless “Chickendales” dancers
Arby’s offered customers a 24-hour-long Hawaiian vacation for $6.
Uber and McDonald’s collabed to promote Uber Eats by enlisting a shark bus to chase a McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish burger car across Auckland’s Waterfront for nine days.
