Marketing is a contest for people's Attention.

The brilliant Seth Godin once said “Marketing is a contest for people's Attention”, and unsurprisingly he is spot on.

The job of all marketing- irrespective of where it sits in the consideration cycle, is to capture people's attention and take some sort of action.

 For brand awareness, this is less tangible, as the action may be more around embedding the brand into a person's subconscious so that when they have that want/need/desire you are top of mind. For more bottom-funnel campaigns the action is more directly correlated with a sales driver.  

Attention is where it starts, and for many brands where it ends.  

 We live in the age of sameness. Homogeneity is everywhere. From architecture to cars, coffee shops, to Airbnb apartments, every category has a certain set of conventions, behavioural principles a 'certain look'. These are often formed around the category leader, with competitors believing that success will come from fulling suit, behaving like a carbon copy.

 The best thing for any brand to do is to understand the rules, decipher what are the important ones, the proof points that a consumer needs to trust and comprehend and then find the rules that are just the status quo and can be broken.

 It is in this white space that is the opportunity to go against the grain, experience the unexpected, take a different course, and capture that all-important metric attention.

 So here is a round-up of the Top of the Pops- aka the best brand campaigns I have seen on the internet over April, all of which were designed to capture attention.

Personally, I think humour, and I mean stuff that is actually funny is one of the most underused emotional cues in marketing. I have to stress 'actually funny', as whilst humour is very subjective, most attempts at humour are just not funny.

 They fall flat, and feel pretty try hard- most likely as they were not written by a comedian or someone who understands the structure and pacing of a good joke, or it has been diluted by a thousand people all having an opinion on what it is to be funny.

 Anyways, I digress.

 I enjoyed this skit from Shreddies, it was weird, it was unexpected, and it caught me off, guard. It tapped into the huge trend around positive affirmations. It was memorable.

 Unlike the majority of ads that I see it got an emotional response from me, which means that it has weaselled its way into my subconscious so the next time I am staring at the cereal aisle, Shreddies are likely to stand out.

You may have seen videos of giant (bus) bags zipping across the streets of Paris. The French fashion brand, Jacquemus took to socials with a campaign designed to support its immersive pop-up at Galeries Lafayett during Paris Fashion Week. The original video has amassed over 12.5 mil views on the original TikTok video, with the campaign being shared widely, including coverage in The Independent, Culted, and Vogue Business.

 After speculation on both sides of the real not real debate, the brand has since confirmed that the bags were a 3D render.

 This campaign proves that the most important element is the idea, a creative idea that has shareability baked into the campaign is the most powerful component to get the all-important element- attention.

For Earth Day SBTRCT (a zero-waste beauty brand) used their products as placards to raise awareness of the ugly side of beauty.

Beauty is an industry that generates 120 billion units of plastic packaging every year.

Only 9% of waste is recycled and 79% accumulates in landfill and natural environments.

For Earth Day SBTRCT (a zero-waste beauty brand) used their products as placards to raise awareness of the ugly side of beauty and hold the industry to account.

What I like about this activation is that very few brands could be this brazen, it is only because of deep sustainable credentials that they can authentically say this.

 What did I miss, what were your top spots in April?