Ambient Marketing
At The Pineapple Agency, we love any kind of marketing or advertising that pushes the boundaries of the normal, and demolishes the mundane. Lately, we’ve been watching a relatively new and modern form of advertising known as “Ambient Marketing“.
Research has shown that the average person sees between 300-700 marketing messages per day. How many of these messages do you ignore? Have you ever seen an ad that really caught your attention? If so, what about that ad made you stop and take a second look?
What is Ambient Marketing?
Ambient marketing uses the ambient environment as a launching point for creativity and novelty, and spices up any mundane setting with an experiential twist. Though similar to guerilla marketing, ambient marketing is more subtle, and contextually tailors a marketing message or advertisement to its surroundings. All you need to pull off ambient marketing is the right context and a great idea, which will be unusual by default, but also creatively linked with the brand. Ambient Marketing, much like other forms of experiential, has the added benefit of being highly viral. When people catch something subtly out of place, humorous, and unique, they’ll want to tell everyone.
Here are a few of our favorite examples of ambient marketing:
Pepsi Max
Pepsi Max recently deployed a very useful and unique ambient marketing idea targeting music festival audiences, called “The Friend Finder”. The idea was to solve a very simple and common problem among festival goers: losing your friends in the crowd. To do so, Pepsi created an army of friend-finding drones that use GPS and a special app to reunite lost festival goers that were separated from their pack. What did Pepsi get out of it? Some subtle, yet effective brand impressions, and a pretty awesome viral video.
Urban Barn
Canadian retail furniture chain Urban Barn took a stab at Ikea, the big fish in the retail furniture industry, with this incredibly clever and humorous ambient marketing campaign, which they set up on the streets right in front of their stores.
Scotch-Brite
The 3M group brand that makes sponges showcased their cleaning skills with a giant sponge hanging from this very clean building.
The beauty of ambient marketing is that with the right idea, you don’t have to break the bank.
