Ads Beyond Adverts: How Digital Campaigns Keep Audiences Engaged with Brands

What was the last ad you saw? The trouble with answering that question in 2024 is that, frankly, it’s too easy to forget. We encounter so much content that it can become a blur, with messages sinking subliminally into our oversaturated consciousnesses if at all. For brands attempting to stand out and drive both engagement and memorability, that poses a tricky problem. If content is everywhere, how does yours get noticed? 

After a conversation with Scott Friedman, ECD and co-founder at Wildlife, it’s easier to see what an answer might look like. The award-winning content studio is built on the idea that “technology changes, but storytelling doesn’t”. As a result, Scott and the Wildlife team have developed a reputation for leveraging the latest technology to deliver on old-fashioned storytelling principles that are proven to win attention and drive engagement for brands. As a result, the studio’s digital campaigns frequently go beyond the norms of linear advertising. 

“For starters, they help your audience go from spending seconds with your brand to spending full minutes with it”, Scott tells LBB. “The depth of the experience is significantly richer, and more interactive. It’s the same design logic that makes video games so sticky and addicting”. 

By way of an example, Scott points to Wildlife’s headline-generating work with Wieden+Kennedy and Doordash at the 2024 Super Bowl. The ‘DoorDash All The Ads’ campaign was an ingenious activation wherein viewers could get everything - yes, everything - advertised during the big game delivered via DoorDash. All they had to do was input a comically long code which appeared during one of the ad breaks on the day, and the result was an intoxicating blend of entertainment and chaos. For DoorDash, the idea made for smart advertising as audiences turned to their phones during the game for a chance to win - driving heavy engagement even as the action on the football field went into overtime.

But there’s always a risk with these kinds of activations - the sheer volume of traffic on the day of the Super Bowl was guaranteed to be sky-high, necessitating the kind of digital infrastructure which would be able to cope. In order to make it happen, the team turned to Scott and Wildlife. 

“With DoorDash, our priority was always to ensure that this thing could sustain a huge amount of users”, says Scott. “Anecdotally, we were aware of how Coinbase got about twenty million people scanning their QR code with a Super Bowl ad a few years ago, all in a matter of minutes. But we were always confident that our site could handle the traffic”. 

On the day, the ad went off without a hitch. “We spent weeks testing every possible fail point, knowing that we only had one chance to get it right”, he explains. 

Another digital Wildlife project which sprang to life leading up to the Super Bowl was the studio’s work with Coors Light. The ‘Chill Train’ saw 100 lucky winners featured in a Coors Light Super Bowl ad, with the train running past our screens featuring celebrity cameos alongside the general public. The campaign relied on thoughtful UX and a custom, real-time ticketing system, which involved a characteristically detail-oriented approach from Wildlife. 

“Along with all the other technical considerations, with campaigns like this you need to account for how much people enjoy being pranksters”, says Scott. “Maybe it’s just human nature, but you’ll invariably have people submitting obscene gestures, rude words, or whatever it might be. It’s expected with any kind of UGC, it just means that we need to be able to systematically screen that kind of thing and make sure it doesn’t become a problem for the brand”. 

Again, the studio’s diligence ensured an incident-free journey for the Chill Train on the day itself. And, just like with the Doordash work, Coors Light found a way to keep audiences engaged with their brand before, during, and after their planned ad time. “That deeper level of interactivity helps a brand’s message to sink through in a more meaningful way”, notes Scott. 

Interactive Engagement

Both the examples we’ve touched on so far came attached to the Super Bowl - a unique cultural moment wherein audiences are naturally engaged with advertising. But does that mean that these kinds of digital activations would be less effective outside of that context? Not so, as Scott goes on to explain. 

“The Super Bowl is a day where advertising and marketing does get treated like entertainment”, he says. “People who might otherwise spend their lives ignoring ads and installing ad blockers are suddenly engaged. But people don’t suddenly stop wanting to be entertained once the Super Bowl is over. I think there are huge opportunities for ads to be more like entertainment regardless of whether it’s a Super Bowl spot or not”. 

To illustrate that point, Scott points to two other Wildlife campaigns which landed on what otherwise would be a regular weekday for the brands in question. The first is ‘Joy Is a State of Drive’ for Volkswagen, in which audiences could bring an AR experience to life in front of them by scanning a QR code on specifically-designed Amazon Prime boxes. 

The second is a campaign for Universal Pictures promoting Fast X, the tenth instalment in the Fast & Furious series. By leveraging AI, users could upload images of themselves which would be treated and re-lit to place them alongside the cast in the world of the film’s key art - allowing anyone to become a Fast & Furious star, and creating inherently shareable content in the process.

AI, coincidentally, could hold the key to allow brands to make digital campaigns even more effective. “AI opens the door to personalisation at scale, which ultimately is what drives the sort of relevance that’s a holy grail for brands”, explains Scott. “It can be used to keep the ideas and message of a brand alive, but totally tailored to the user”. 

In a sense, these kinds of digital campaigns prove so effective because they make good on the original promise of the internet itself. They’re interactive and personalised, driving engagement and relevance in equal measure. There’s a now-viral interview with David Bowie from the late 90s, in which the starman presciently predicts how the internet would eventually upend popular culture. 

“The state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico that it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about”, he told the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman in 1999. 

Digital campaigns help brands to become part of that cultural revolution, and cut through the media noise by engaging their audiences - opening a conversation with them, rather than talking at them. And, as Scott predicts, they’re only going to become more effective. 

“Each project we produce gives us a little more insight into consumer behaviour”, he says. “After more than a decade of these kinds of projects we have a really strong idea of what makes audiences want to spend time with your brand. And we want to put those ideas to use!”