What a year 2024 has been for marketing and PR campaigns. We’ve seen the wonderful, the wow, and the downright weird (let’s be honest).
Before we look ahead to 2025, what better time to step back and talk about the creative and iconic campaigns from the year? After all, we marketers like a bit of praise every now and then.
We’ve refreshed our memories (and scrolled back through our LinkedIn reposts) just for you, to dig out our personal favourite marketing campaigns and PR stunts from 2024. Here are our top five…
Specsavers’ parking stunt
Arguably one of the most well-known straplines out there, ‘should have gone to Specsavers’ has become an everyday phrase for everyday blunders. Earlier this year, Specsavers organised an eye-catching and hilarious parking mishap in Edinburgh. A branded Specsavers van, apparently stuck on a retractable bollard next to a ‘no parking’ sign, left passersby and the internet baffled. Was this just a typical Saturday night in Edinburgh? Nope, it was a genius publicity stunt that went viral. This shows how effective simple yet effective ideas can be when it comes to PR and marketing campaigns.
Image credit: The Goods
Wicked collaborations
Set to ‘defy gravity’, the Wicked film adaptation was highly anticipated, and it did not disappoint. Combining brand collaborations with teasers, Universal went all out to get people talking about this movie. Universal partnered with over 400 brands*, from Starbucks to Lego, to create a buzz. The options for partnership opportunities were truly ‘unlimited’. Personally, we’re definitely here for all things pink and green.
Image credit: Universal Pictures
Surreal: Bosh and the hunger is gone!
We love Surreal’s marketing at the moment. It’s funny, quirky and definitely outside the (cereal) box. Surreal decided to bring back Cillit Bang’s mid-2000s icon Barry Scott. Surreal renamed Barry to ‘Gary’ Scott, changing the famous ‘bang and the dirt is gone’ slogan to ‘bosh and the hunger is gone’. This funny ad shows that Surreal have a fantastic understanding of their target audience.
O2 AI grandma
We all love it when brands do good things. Combine this with pranking phone scammers, and O2 are definitely in our good books. Meet Daisy, everyone’s stereotypical grandma. She has a cat, she loves to knit, and she does NOT like scammers. She’s also AI-generated, FYI. This impressive conversational artificial intelligence chatbot was created by O2 to waste scammers’ time and promote O2’s fraud prevention technology.
Nurofen: See my pain
Nurofen’s ‘see my pain’ campaign is all about closing the gender pain gap by making women’s pain more visible in healthcare. In 2024, Nurofen unveiled a huge pill packet sculpture in Newcastle, which highlighted the fact that 1 in 2 women felt their pain was dismissed due to their gender.
Image credit: Campaign
Honorary mentions…
Not everyone made it into the top five list, but here are a few honorary mentions.
- Jaguar: A bold Jaguar rebrand indeed; we did enjoy some of the creative reactions it generated from other brands. The ‘copy nothing’ slogan was repurposed by tech company ‘Nothing’, who temporarily changed their X bio to ‘copy Jaguar’. Aldi also got quite tongue-in-cheek and creative with it all. These are great examples of how brands can be reactive and jump on trends to harness brand awareness.
- Premier Inn/ What’s Occur-Inn: Here at Tempt HQ, we’re all excited about the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special. So, we loved it when the Barry Island Premier Inn rebranded to the ‘What’s Occur-Inn’. They even had a Nessa lookalike behind the desk. This reactive and fun stunt definitely got people talking.
- Duolingo’s bird flu: We love Duolingo, but their iconic mascot looked a little under the weather earlier this year. Users of the language learning app noticed a change in the app’s icon and took to the internet to express their concern for the Duolingo owl. This spot of ‘bird flu’ was an effective way of grabbing attention, getting people talking, and bringing users back to the app.
What was your favourite marketing campaign of 2024? Did we miss any? Let us know!
Wondering who we are? We’re an award-winning social media marketing and PR agency, and we’ve delivered campaigns for a variety of brands in Manchester and across the UK.
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*https://variety.com/2024/film/features/wicked-marketing-campaign-brand-partnerships-1236222100/
