A brilliant campaign from Element

I’ve just seen a campaign for Element Skateboards that has made my afternoon and given me hope that all advertising is not cynical.

Element’s vision is to “bring progress to skateboarding”. Skaters can be an anarchistic bunch at the best of times, and it only takes a whiff of corporate cynicism for them to accuse you of being a sell-out. I love this campaign as it’s actually giving something back to the skate community as well as selling their brand.

If you can’t see the video above, Elements invites skaters to “claim” local spots by filming themselves doing the sickest tricks (yes, I know that makes me sound like a nana), which they then tag on Google Maps, and other users can vote on your trick. If you have the maddest trick (see previous brackets) that spot is claimed as yours.

They encouraged pro skaters to claim their own personal favourite spots, so everyone else could challenge them to the spot.

This campaign feels perfect, with the right level of community engagement, understanding of their target market, and social integration. There were a couple of things I didn’t like - sticking stickers onto the skate spot sucks (yes I’m a nana but it’s visual pollution), and they totally screwed up their online marketing. I’ve just tried to go to the URL they advertised in the video (http://claim-it.com/) which is an insurance site, and googling “Elements claim it” only leads to Youtube videos, no website. They might have taken down the website, which seems a bizarre decision as the information it had will still be relevant long past the campaign’s end.

But all in all, I love this campaign and it makes me wish I had a skate brand as a client.

Update: ok after a bit of googling around, and wondering why Element didn’t mention it anywhere, I found out that apparently the video was created by two advertising students, and the campaign never ran. Ah my afternoon has fallen flat, the campaign was too good to be true.

This post is tagged under: Marketing, social networking, trends