With the launch of Oreos new s’mores flavored cookies, the brand Instagramed a series of PSA-style posters about where not to light campfires. The idea: There’s no campfire necessary with Oreo S’mores.
Airbnb’s Instagram typically inspires travel lust. Playing on the whimsical and giving you a good reason to check back in on Tuesdays, they post pics of bookable treehouses under the hashtag #treehousetuedays.
The Marvel superhero movie hasn’t come out yet, but in April, tiny billboards started appearing in Australian cities. So, what do you do when you see something odd? Take a picture and post that business on social media. The tiny billboards also wound up getting write ups in Adweek and Time.
How do you educate people about preventing home break-ins without being preachy? Legos. That’s what the Edinburgh Police did this April with a series of Lego-illustrated tips for home safety.
The two companies partnered on a multi-platform campaign which included Twitter, Facebook, and a television ad with the goal of finding homes for 20,000 dogs. The hashtag #homerocks trended the entire night the ad aired, their Facebook efforts had 2.3 million unique reach, and we got to watch cute dogs.
If the Apple Watch hype was too much for you, in April, Netflix released a spoof video for a fake product called the Netflix Watch. It’s absurd. And people would probably buy it.
Someone clearly didn’t think this through to see how an innocuous joke shoehorning their product into the news of more racially diverse emoji could actually end up sounding incredibly offensive. They apologized quickly. It was a bleachable moment indeed.
When Bud Light launched its #upforwhatever campaign, it also revealed the tagline “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night,” which drew a lot of criticism and discussion about rape culture… and how no one thought it was remotely creepy before slapping it all over their product. They’ve since abandoned the slogan.
Though their intentions may have been good, Starbucks’ campaign to start a conversation on race between its baristas and customers made for a lot of awkward brand coverage.
Erin Carson is a Staff Reporter for CNET and a former Multimedia Editor for TechRepublic.
