The Promo Playbook by Cubic Promote
Welcome to The Promo Playbook, your backstage pass to the world of promotional marketing. Brought to you by Cubic Promote (https://www.cubicpromote.com.au/) Australia’s award-winning supplier of branded merchandise, this podcast is your go-to guide for making marketing and promo products work harder for your business. In each episode, we unpack real campaigns, talk to industry insiders, and share practical strategies to help you boost brand visibility, engage customers, and stand out. From trade shows to onboarding kits, we cover it all — with no fluff, just real insights that convert.
The Promo Playbook by Cubic Promote
Marketing Stunts That Made Headlines
Ever wondered how some brands capture massive attention without spending a fortune? In this episode of the Promo Playbook, host Charles welcomes guest Anil, a veteran entrepreneur from the early dot-com days who brings rich experience from multiple successful technology ventures.
The conversation unveils brilliantly simple yet effective marketing tactics that challenge conventional thinking. Anil reveals how one Australian telco achieved years of free television exposure by positioning a costumed mascot strategically in front of broadcast cameras at auctions – gaining priceless visibility without spending a dollar on advertising. Meanwhile, Charles shares IKEA's ingenious campaign that recreated iconic living rooms from beloved TV shows like Friends and The Simpsons, creating an instant emotional connection that spread organically across social media platforms.
Perhaps most fascinating is the story of an SEO company that hired models dressed as nurses to offer "health checks" at an industry expo – a tactic that unexpectedly generated newspaper coverage debating advertising ethics.
The discussion culminates with a counter-intuitive insight about promotional timing: while most companies cluster their client outreach with Corporate Gifts, Staff Gifts and Promotional products during year-end festivities, strategic mid-year promotions often achieve greater impact when recipients aren't overwhelmed with competing messages.
Whether you're running a small business or managing corporate marketing, these real-world examples demonstrate how creativity, timing, and understanding audience psychology can transform your marketing effectiveness without breaking your budget.
Ready to make your brand impossible to ignore? Connect with us on your preferred social platform and subscribe for more insider strategies on the Promo Playbook. What unexpected marketing tactic will you try next?
Find out more and visit our website: https://www.cubicpromote.com.au/
Welcome to the next episode of the Provo Playbook by Cubic Promote. Today I've got my lovely guest, Anil. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Charles, my pleasure. So a bit about Anil. He's got a bit of a pedigree when it comes to business. Would you like to just briefly introduce to the audience a bit about what you've done in the past?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, charles. Look, I started off in the early dot-com days back in the mid-90s 1996. I've started a couple of my own technology companies and have been quite successful in selling those to some very large organizations. I've also worked for other fast-growing organizations in the technology space as well. So I actually have seen quite a lot of different techniques used to get an audience's attention in the current landscape of what's going on in terms of social media and that brings us to this episode.
Speaker 1:This episode, we're going to focus exclusively on marketing, specifically marketing tactics, techniques, even stunts, and we'll just go over some of the more interesting things we've seen in our lifetimes. So Anil marketing, when it comes to just purely getting people's attention. What are some of the most interesting things you've either seen in the past or perhaps done in the past?
Speaker 2:Okay, look, I've seen quite a lot. Two particular instances that come to mind, Charles. But what was quite interesting, in several years I saw a very high-profile, well-known Tier 2 telco advertising and what they did is they actually had a person stand there right next to the auctioneer in front of the camera, so they were highly visible scene and they had a big suit on which represented the company's logo and I won't say the name, but, for example, tele choice or something along those lines and the person was just standing there as the camera came on. He was looking around. Sometimes he was jumping up and down and bopping his head and turning around, but he was on there for several years in a row.
Speaker 1:So was he literally dressed like a mascot, or did he simply have the clothing in the color scheme of the brand?
Speaker 2:No, it was a full mascot, just like the mascots that your company has done, Charles, for other companies. Amazing, and that was quite interesting. It always stuck in my mind like they don't have to pay for the advertising. They just pretty much stand there in front of a camera where they know a TV camera is going to be, which with a very large.
Speaker 1:So simple and so smart. Yeah, it's so effective, especially nowadays where it's all about brand recollection, where people simply need to be exposed to a brand many times in order for it to stick in their mind that that brand is the best for any given service. I've seen a couple of interesting ones myself as well. One of the more interesting ones was, a couple of years ago, ikea did a global launch where they used some of their furniture, but instead of just taking a regular pictures of someone's well-manicured living room bedroom, what they did? Instead they use iconic TV shows TV shows such as Friends, sitcom, the Simpsons, even Stranger Things and a few other shows and they used the furniture to create the living room of those shows.
Speaker 1:And visually it was spectacular and, as you can imagine, a lot of people latched onto these photographs because they were also humorous. It appealed to each and every audience within that show. Perhaps you're a fan of the Simpsons. Then you will want to see what the Simpson living room looks like with an IKEA interpretation Just went like hotcakes through social media, with people sharing the videos, sharing the pictures. I thought that was a brilliant idea. Were there any other instances in the past that you would recall that you thought, wow, that was a bloody good idea, either by myself or any other customer that you've seen outside in Australia.
Speaker 2:Yes, look, absolutely, Charles. There are quite a few, but the next one I'll share is one that comes to mind. There is a large yearly conference on in Australia called the Online Retailer Expo, which is essentially an exposition down here at the ICC. That's coming up this year as well. It's coming up next month, July the 24th. Yes, time flies. It's July the 24th, I believe, and so the company that I was working for at the time. They were offering a SEO health check service.
Speaker 1:For those who don't know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Speaker 2:It's to enable people to be more visible on Google, bing and other search engines, and the idea of the SEO health check was to gain interaction and engagement with new customers and essentially give them a free health check to see what their existing provider is or isn't doing wrong. Now, the interesting thing about this campaign is the company actually hired two models and they dressed them up in nurses uniforms with stethoscopes and they essentially were walking around to the crowd that were passing by saying get your free health check, almost like going and getting a health check at a doctor's clinic. Now it was quite interesting.
Speaker 2:The company and I'll say we, because I was working for them at the time in a different area- the interesting thing is we got exposure in all of the newspapers and I think one of them very close to the front with articles. Various articles were written along the lines of advertising and sexism, Rightly or wrongly. The fact of the matter is several newspapers were talking about the company and they got free advertising, free exposure, and I found that extremely smart.
Speaker 1:That is a really good idea, but sexism it could actually have gone both ways. Hypothetically, you could just have easily gone from both male models and female models, appeal to every demographic out there, or almost every demographic out there, and still have the same results, simply because it's equal opportunity.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, charles. I think the problem at the time was getting the models at the last minute, and there are a lot of female models available through the different agencies, and the male ones were somewhat harder to get.
Speaker 1:Did you have any tracking after the event to see how successful it was? But I could imagine just from a purely branding point of view. When it comes to branding, it is incredibly hard to track how many eyeballs actually build your brand, but did you have any tracking to see whether there was an uptick of as a result of that? Did you see any? Any difference at all?
Speaker 2:well, charles. Certainly on the event, that was very successful in terms of getting customers attention for engagement. I don't think I could honestly answer what that specific marketing scheme in regard to having dressed up as opposed to just having normal staff there, but it certainly got our name out there and got us noticed.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. I've got a final story to share as well, and this is just more of a general marketing tactic, and it's a tactic that we utilize ourselves. So during the course of a year January through to December a lot of businesses, organizations they would typically start the year and then they'll end the year with a mighty big bang and at the end of the year there will likely be end of year parties, there'll be gifts for clients, gifts for staff, and that's all brilliant and stuff, Until a friend of mine who's also a business owner, he said to me Charles, why are you promoting to your clients and yourself? Why are you sending out all these corporate gifts and all these promotional gifts at the end of the year, when everyone is frantic at work, receiving multiple parcels from multiple locations and multiple people, when you should really be doing it at the middle of the year, June, July, that's the time when a lot of people would not quite be as busy. That will have a lot of time, and when they do receive something, it'll become a lot more memorable.
Speaker 1:So, not so much a marketing stunt or a tactic, but timing, in my mind, makes a big difference. Just to time when to promote an activity. Don't time it when everyone is doing it at the same time. Time it at a quiet time. No matter what your industry is, there will be a quiet season, depending on what you do, and that's the time to actually execute. How do you feel about the timing when it comes to?
Speaker 2:marketing stunts and marketing activities. Look, absolutely. It's a good question, charles, and it's extremely important to pay attention Whether it be organizations that have peak seasons and off seasons. It might also be well, for example, things like schools and universities. If we were a company selling to schools and universities, we need to be very well aware of when the student enrolments.
Speaker 2:For example, aged care facilities. We find a lot of aged care facilities like to give their residents gifts around Christmas, so we would typically start marketing to them around the September, october months, so that way they could be aware of us, they could reach out to us. We could go back and forth for a few weeks. We could obtain a purchase order and then get goods delivered prior to in December sometime. So there'll be enough time to get the delivery. There's no point in us starting to advertise to them with our budget in January, february, march for gifts, when typically those gifts are given out in bulk towards the end of the year. So it's very important to break down any marketing budgets that one might have to get them sent out in various stages.
Speaker 1:Yes, timing matters Well. Thank you, Neil, Really appreciate you being on this episode For the audience out there. Please connect with us on your social media of choice. We'll have all the relevant links. Please stay tuned for the next episode of the Promo Playbook. Thank you so much.
