Coming Soon to Your Corner …

There’s a rising trend these days in viral location-based marketing. A lot of people have been talking about this clever campaign for TNT, these secret-agent Coke machines branded toward the latest Bond flick and this hilarious bus stop campaign from the folks at Qualcomm.

What are the agencies behind these campaigns doing right? In a word, spectacle. With talented plants and careful planning, they’ve managed to generate visual fireworks on a dime — and draw the attention of everyone in the area as well. But of course, it all means nothing without the hidden cameras and sleek editing. The real value is in the sharing: watching our friends watch people as they watch something amazing happen.

And let us not discount the can’t-miss alchemy of mixing crazy contrivances with regular folks. You can’t fake some of the reactions in these campaigns, and there’s no getting around the fact that these things really happened. Maybe not to you, or in your soma carisoprodol muscle relaxant hometown, but they did happen somewhere, to someone. That feels very different from a canned spot on a soundstage.

Final bonus: All three campaigns use cleverly integrated slogans to make sense of the chaos: TNT’s “Push to Add Drama,” Coke’s “Unlock the 007 in You” and Qualcomm’s “Born Mobile” all dovetail nicely with their respective marketing concepts.

If we had to pick one bone of contention, though, it feels like only TNT’s campaign relates in a lasting way to the brand. The Coke campaign seems better suited to Mountain Dew, or perhaps Stoli, while the Qualcomm campaign might feel more at home for a bubbly Internet startup than a 28-year-old semiconductor manufacturer. But hey, that’s why they say marketing changes everything.

Some good brand experts are at work here, and our hats are off to them. Here’s hoping that yellow Lamborghini makes a stop in our home of Somerville sometime soon.

Watch all three videos below:

TNT:

Coke:
http://youtu.be/RDiZOnzajNU
Qualcomm:

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