Just when you thought that annoying flash mob trend was finally over, not just one or two but three European brands find a way to breathe new life into the gimmick. In this case, Nivea, Ferrero’s Tic Tac mints and TV network TNT have set up surprisingly cool flash mobs with the respective help of agencies DraFCB and Ogilvy & Mather in Paris and Duval Guillaume Modem in Antwerp.
Nivea kicked off the comeback mid-March with a stunt in which a woman gets the bachelorette treatment after dabbing Nivea Q10 lotion on her wrist and neck. Now I guess you can’t exactly call this a “flash mob” but it’s very much inspired by the concept. As the brand puts it, it’s a combination of “flashmob, street theatre, block-party and fairytale”. The execution is not revolutionary but it’s a fun way to communicate product benefits and to “refresh” the brand.
The Tic Tac flash mob took place in the French city of Rouen, where actors asked innocent passersby for directions and fainted after a few seconds (along with everyone else on the plaza), ostensibly due to the stench of their bad breath. A video then played on a giant screen and prompted the pranked passersby to freshen up their breath using Tic Tac mints.
The TNT stunt was the most dramatic. The network placed a large red button in the middle of an “average town square” in a small Flemish town and invited people to “push to add drama.” And, well, curious passersby that pushed the button did get their money’s worth…
You may have seen the videos of the events already, as they have gone viral these past weeks. In fact, it turns out that the TNT video has become the second most-shared ad video of all-time according to video research firm Unruly. Indeed, it got shared more than 3 million times since it went live on Friday, second only to Volkswagen’s “The Force” Super Bowl commercial. It’s kind of hard to tell why the videos were so successful, but one reason may be that pranks are a pretty basic and effective form of humor and therefore people deemed the videos funny enough to share them with their friends.
(Sources: Adverblog, AgencySpy, Creativity Online, Mashable)
