With over 29.6m viewers on Oscar night, this event qualifies as one of the biggest avenues for advertising in the US.
Rising up to the occasion, many brands capitalized this as usual in 2019 and came up with ideas to catch the attention of the viewers.
Lets take a quick look at the ones who made the most of the Academy Awards 2019.
Nike: Dream crazier
One of the best campaign launches on Oscar 2019 night and probably the best so far this year: Nike
I love what Nike does to the audience. Nike inspires, Nike instills hope, it is almost as if their ads are meant to push humanity to break the barriers of performance.
They did it again in this brilliant ground-breaking ad: Dream Crazier. It is about female athletes who reached the peak despite all the obstacles and criticism.
This ad deserves more than just a few lines, so, more on this in a later post
Netflix: The Irishman
Netflix had much to say this Oscar, apart from winning 4 awards. They screened a surprise trailer for their latest production, “The Irishman”, starring stalwarts like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci et al, directed by Martin Scorsese.
It was a nicely timed launch for a trailer and it sure did get people talking.
On a side note, please do watch the documentary that Netflix won one of the awards for, “Period. End of Sentence”. It is about how women are impacted due to lack of access to sanitary pads. You can also read about it on IMDB here.
#HeyGoogle, Lets go to the movies
We saw how Amazon Alexa took the center-stage in the Superbowl earlier this month. Google seems to be following closely in this cleverly woven advert with Google Assistant inserted between clips of movies, showing how it assist them.
Its worth a watch or two, quite entertaining.
Budweiser: Reserve Copper Lager
Well, here’s another brand trying to work with girl power. It doesn’t really augur well with many American men (or many other nationalities) to see their ilk getting beaten by a woman.
Some of the comments on youtube were actually quite juvenile.
Well, grow up guys.
Full marks to Budweiser for trying to do something different compared to other male dominated beer adverts for other brands (and its own older ads).
Cadillac: Rise Above
Another brand that decided to launch a new campaign during the event was Cadillac. It came up with its new tagline, “Rise Above” this Oscars, replacing the 4 year old “Dare Greatly” campaign.
Again, the brand’s use of predominantly women characters points towards the willingness of brands nowadays to look at women as a potential core target.
Walmart: Wardrobe Assistant
Although Walmart was the official sponsor of the Oscars this year and it decided to tailor its approach to the event with a behind the scenes kind of ad, I found their work a bit too convoluted to understand first glance.
They created a video showing some famous stylists working on stylists who worked behind the scenes in movies. And at the time of the show, all those famous stylists’ works were available on Walmart for purchase.
Phew! I am not even sure I understood their message right. This was one hell of a mess of advertising by Walmart.
The key is to keep it simple guys. The audience doesn’t necessarily need to know how smart you are.
Or maybe they do, but what Walmart did was not.
So, this is it on the Oscars for now. Stay tuned for more updates on marketing and advertising news and trends from all over the world.
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