Hails & Fails – February 14th 2025
Happy Valentine’s Day! Whether you’re single, taken or it’s complicated, we hope you enjoy a day filled with love. Speaking of love, here’s three campaigns we’re swooning over this week.
IKEA found lucky Brits their sleep soulmates, Duolingo went viral for an announcement and Brazen’s long-standing client Dr. Beckmann coined a new cleaning term! While shoe brand Crocs had a really, really bad week…
HAILS
Love is in the air… mattress
IKEA teamed up with dating app Breeze to bring together singles looking for love based on… their sleep compatibility!
Based on IKEA’s ‘Six Sleep Essentials’ such as a mattress’ firmness, room temperature and duvet thickness, expert matchmakers paired couples up this Valentine’s Day to enjoy a first date in an IKEA store to test true compatibility in the bedroom. The date included a free romantic dinner of IKEA meatballs with your potential sleep soulmate.
All Hail Duo!
Language app Duolingo reminded the world why they are the benchmark for social advertising by announcing the shocking “death” of its famous green mascot, Duo the Owl, in a stunt that got the whole internet talking.
The news was shared in an Instagram post in which the brand jokes that app users themselves were responsible for the tragedy and that he met his fate waiting for them to complete their lessons… “Tbh, he probably died waiting for you to do your lesson, but what do we know”.
In true Duolingo fashion, the humour is unhinged with TikTok videos even showing the much-loved animal being carried away in a makeshift coffin.
Dr. BeckmanN Coins New Term
Brazen client Dr. Beckmann created and owned a brand-new cleaning term, ‘Lessting’, after the strategy & creative team noticed a cultural shift in Millennial & Gen X women decluttering their homes.
Brazen’s research revealed that one in four 29–44-year-olds are embracing the art of decluttering and living with less – the opposite of ‘Nesting’.
Bringing in TV personality Dilly Carter as the brand ambassador, Brazen hosted a broadcast day and shot social content to inspire the brand’s target audience to try Lessting if they hadn’t already… with a helping hand from their space saving Magic Sheets!
FAIL
A Not So Super Bowl for Crocs
Shoe retailer Crocs is our fail of the week thanks to a series of chaotic, confusing social posts that we still can’t explain.
The incoherent tweets were posted during Sunday’s Super Bowl and include a tweet simply reading “jpng:;;”, whatever that means, and another announcing they ”need someone to grease my poles”.
The posts are so bad the internet has assumed they were hacked, or it was a sabotage by an ex-employee.
However, one optimistic commenter argued it could be a smart marketing strategy. “Worked quite well tbh…. you’re talking about it on socials and sharing their pictures… that’s free advertising for them”.
Bad publicity is good publicity, right? Right?
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