The Inter­ac­tive Adver­tis­ing Bureau (IAB) recent­ly released a report that exam­ines 24 award-win­ning cam­paigns from around the world. Each of the report’s case stud­ies includes com­men­tary, dig­i­tal video, and clear-cut met­rics that reflect the over­whelm­ing suc­cess of these cam­paigns designed for a vari­ety of brands and audi­ences. Let’s look at six of the cam­paigns curat­ed from var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al IAB MIXX Awards pro­grams and oth­er sim­i­lar hon­ors around the world.

Although cre­at­ing great dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is both an art and a sci­ence, these award-win­ning cam­paigns from the IAB’s “What Works & Why: IAB Glob­al Insights Report 2015,” spot­light three themes that mar­keters who believe in a strong cus­tomer-cen­tric focus will want to under­stand:

• Authen­tic­i­ty: Work that deeply res­onates with local con­sumers.
• Cred­i­bil­i­ty and niche demos: Work that engages by age, pro­fes­sions, and pas­sions.
• Uni­ver­sal truths: Work that demon­strates mobile behav­iors that cross con­ti­nents.

Authenticity

Work That Deeply Resonates With Local Consumers

The “Amer­i­ca Is Beau­ti­ful” cam­paign enabled The Coca-Cola Com­pa­ny to change the con­ver­sa­tion in social media.

The Unit­ed States is com­mon­ly called a melt­ing pot, refer­ring to the many eth­nic­i­ties and cul­tur­al back­grounds rep­re­sent­ed by its cit­i­zens. But when Coca-Cola cel­e­brat­ed this diver­si­ty in a Super Bowl TV spot, it launched a social media con­tro­ver­sy that near­ly eclipsed the big game itself.

Over videos of Amer­i­cans enjoy­ing hap­py moments, the patri­ot­ic song “Amer­i­ca the Beau­ti­ful” was sung in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Social media explod­ed with both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive com­ments.

To steer the con­ver­sa­tion toward inclu­sive­ness, Coca-Cola sent tai­lored ver­sions of the video (LGBT, Native Amer­i­can, inter­ra­cial par­ents, among oth­er demo­graph­ic cat­e­gories) to Amer­i­cans on Face­book based on their user data. Those high­ly tar­get­ed and emo­tion­al videos then helped lift the pos­i­tive chat­ter and pushed Coca-Cola to the No. 1 trend­ing top­ic on Face­book dur­ing the Super Bowl and for two days after.

More than 87 mil­lion per­son­al­ized invi­ta­tions were sent. The effort attract­ed 63 mil­lion earned impres­sions. Aver­age engage­ment per Face­book post: 18,447 likes, 2,433 com­ments, and 5,604 shares.

The “One Man Rand” video on YouTube enabled San­lam to con­nect on a deep­er lev­el with its South African audi­ence.

South Africans have a spend­ing and sav­ing prob­lem. House­hold debt aver­ages 75 per­cent of South Africans’ after-tax income.

To draw aware­ness to this prob­lem, San­lam, one of the country’s lead­ing finan­cial ser­vices com­pa­nies, embarked on an exper­i­ment in which one man would pay for every­thing with one Rand coins. (One Rand is worth near­ly USD $0.10.) He had his salary paid to him in coins. He pur­chased every­thing he need­ed in change.

His crazy adven­tures were cap­tured on video and pro­duced into week­ly episodes. Finan­cial experts weighed in with advice, and con­sumer and social media loud­ly ampli­fied the effort.

The result: the “One Rand Man” video ranked No. 1 for YouTube South Africa with more than 900,000 views. The work also gen­er­at­ed more than 74 mil­lion media impres­sions.

Credibility & Niche Demos

Work That Engages By Age, Professions, Passions

“Rip Curl Search GPS” enabled the Aus­tralian design­er, man­u­fac­tur­er, and retail­er of surf­ing sports­wear and accom­pa­ny­ing prod­ucts to tar­get at a niche demo.

For surfers around the world, the per­fect wave is an elu­sive goal. But Rip Curl used tech­nol­o­gy to make this uni­ver­sal goal eas­i­er to attain.

The Rip Curl Search plat­form is a smart­watch with mobile and desk­top apps that mea­sures users’ surf­ing activ­i­ty (speed, dis­tance and wave count) and allows them to share it with the world. For the first time, surfers can track and share their activ­i­ties, dig­i­tal­ly search out where they’re most like­ly to find the per­fect wave, and fol­low the pros and their friends.

Rip Curl turned a soli­tary and fleet­ing expe­ri­ence into a share­able one, unit­ing a frag­ment­ed glob­al com­mu­ni­ty under their brand and sell­ing 30,000 pre-orders of the watch in the first week of launch.

“Zwrot­ka Żyw­ca (Żywiec ‘The Verse’)” enabled Żywiec to become world famous in Poland.

Music and adver­tis­ing have worked togeth­er to engage con­sumers around the world for decades. Beer brand Żywiec added user par­tic­i­pa­tion and brand response into the mix to achieve great­ness.

The brand pro­mot­ed its Męskie Granie 2014 (Male Music Con­cert Tour), its artists, and the new sin­gle “Elec­tri­cal” by cre­at­ing a web-based music “Mad Lib.” Users select­ed lyrics from thou­sands of word options online that fit with the rhythm and tone of “Elec­tri­cal.”

Top Pol­ish artists then per­formed the new song – yes, every sin­gle ver­sion of it, and 150,000 ver­sion of the song were cre­at­ed. The new lyrics cre­at­ed songs of all kinds, even ridicu­lous ones with lyrics like “The great shark hears a cauliflower’s scream.” The fun and per­son­al­iza­tion of the music expe­ri­ence caught on.

Five hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ed; peo­ple even used the vers­es as their com­ments in social media. Users spent an aver­age of more than 6 min­utes on the web­site. And the music video was viewed more than 1.5 mil­lion times.

Universal Truths

Work That Demonstrates Mobile Behaviors That Cross Continents

The “Turn Off To Turn On” cam­paign enabled Durex demon­strate that mobile phones and, well, sex are two inter­ests that most of the world has in com­mon. When Durex real­ized that gad­gets were inter­fer­ing with people’s sex lives, it had land­ed on an insight that pow­ered a cam­paign from its ori­gin in the UK to a glob­al audi­ence.

Durex’s viral “Turn Off to Turn On” cam­paign includ­ed a series of Face­book posts, mis­sion state­ments, and a short film pro­mot­ing the mes­sage to turn off devices in order to “turn on.” To make the mes­sage even more rel­e­vant and time­ly, the mar­keter timed it all to Earth Hour, when peo­ple, glob­al­ly, are urged to pow­er down for an hour.

“This Earth Hour I’m a lover, not a gamer,” one head­line said. “We will log out, pow­er down, close the tablet, switch off the TV, and reboot our rela­tion­ships,” anoth­er read. The results were stag­ger­ing:

• The work gained 1.96 bil­lion cam­paign impres­sions.
• Video views reached 85 mil­lion across 56 coun­tries.
• The effort gen­er­at­ed pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment 97.8 per­cent of the time.

“#ShareThe­So­fa” enabled Heineken to answer a uni­ver­sal ques­tion: Would you rather watch a UEFA Cham­pi­ons League game alone (as most fans do) or with a soc­cer leg­end? The obvi­ous answer to this ques­tion is the insight behind Heineken’s block­buster live sec­ond-screen show, #ShareThe­So­fa.

Through Twit­ter and Vine, view­ers could watch the game beside foot­ball leg­ends, also plant­ed on a sofa (but in Heineken style, of course, with the help of hip friends, cheer­lead­ers, freestylers and oth­ers). Fans could use the hash­tag to ask them ques­tions, which the soc­cer stars would respond to, or they could just watch and read the real-time show.

Heineken, a game spon­sor, com­ple­ment­ed the main event with­out tak­ing it over and cre­at­ed a huge, glob­al com­mu­ni­ty to boot. The results speak for them­selves:

• #Sharethe­So­fa reached fans in 94 coun­tries.
• It earned 1.2 bil­lion media impres­sions.
• The brand con­nect­ed with 13.4 mil­lion Twit­ter han­dles every game.
• Heineken was present in 79 per­cent of all con­ver­sa­tion relat­ed to the Cham­pi­ons League on Twit­ter, more than any oth­er spon­sor in the his­to­ry of Twit­ter.
• The work sold beer. Pur­chase intent went up 7 per­cent.

Suc­cess­ful dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing in every cor­ner of the globe is char­ac­ter­ized by authen­tic dia­logue and cre­ativ­i­ty. Brands and mar­keters who believe in a strong cus­tomer-cen­tric focus will be delight­ed to know that dig­i­tal is a bor­der­less medi­um that nonethe­less deeply respects region­al and cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences.