The Azrieli Towers in salute to the IDF soldiers./from the net.
This week there were hundreds of thousands of messages in this style on social media and WhatsApp: "Have you seen Azrieli? Is this real?!"
In fact, it is a 19-second video that ran online, in which the three Azrieli Towers are visible, with the berets of paratroopers, Golani and Givati displayed on each tower, and between the buildings a disc with the inscription "Salute to the IDF soldiers".
It took a few hours for the audience to realize that this was a digital display created Through a 3D studio, the film looks so real that some people even traveled specially to the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv to film the performance themselves, and then they realized that nothing of what they saw in the video really existed in reality.
How do you create a campaign that deceives with imagination?
Those responsible for this creative digital display are the advertiser Yahav Dreizen and the 3D designer Yair Shalit.
To create the campaign, they photographed the place with the background noises of the street, the movement of the people and the surrounding atmosphere, creating an authentic feeling of amateur photography done with a mobile phone taken by a passerby.
After the shoot, they created all the props in the shoot in 3D and added them to the film.
After hours of precision work, which focuses on the balance between the real photo and the virtual extras, they arrived at the final product.
The product, which looks authentic and amateurish, is completely part of a deliberate marketing move, and it even has a name - FOOH - Fake out of Home - and is the strongest trend in marketing in 2024.
We met this concept in the world of marketing as early as 2023 with branded campaigns by the companies Maybelline New York, Nike, the luxury bag brand Jackmus and more.
What all these amazing campaigns have in common is that it is not clear to the viewers what exactly they saw in the short video, so they watch it again and again.
When you see the video for the first time, you are sure that someone filmed it on the street because he happened to be passing by, saw this performance and uploaded it to the web.
Because the videos seem authentic and random, people immediately pass them on and they go viral.
The virality works
In the Jacquemus campaign, people forwarded the video accompanied by a message along the lines of "Did you see how Jacquemus' bags stopped traffic on the streets of Paris?"
In this case too, it was a 3D work.
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Jacquemus' bags go for a walk on the streets of Paris./from the net
unprecedented involvement
One of the most talked about campaigns was Maybelline's "Train Campaign" - a short video in which a huge mascara brush combs the long eyelashes that are pasted on the front of a passenger train in London.
The campaign became so viral that the brand's VP of Marketing claimed that it led to 451 percent higher engagement than all of the brand's last 30 posts combined. She did not imagine that the campaign would be so viral and garner such a large amount of shares, articles and mentions, which made the campaign one of the most famous and talked about of the year.
Maybelline's mascara brushes the London Underground's eyelashes./off the grid
When the Eiffel Tower caught fire
Natalie Zahar./Sally Ben Ari
For a FOOH campaign to be successful it must include an event that is perceived as realistic, one that makes sense to us that it actually happened.
A few days ago, photos and videos of the Eiffel Tower on fire ran online.
The network was on fire, people called the police and the tower's official website was flooded with surfers, but of course there was no mention in the media that there was indeed a fire in the tower.
Almost 24 hours passed before people realized that this was a completely fake event.
Here too, as in the other videos, be careful of amateur photography, background noises and even the reflection of an image from a mobile phone of a fictitious viewer, but above all, the fact that in light of the security situation and the alerts this type of event is not far-fetched makes the video believable, viral and in this case even stressful.
The image of the burning Eiffel Tower that managed to stress many residents in Paris./from the network
How is this tool used to raise global awareness of the situation of the abductees?
A few weeks ago women from all over the world shared a short video from Time Square in New York where you see a huge green sign with the inscription "Hamas raped and murdered hundreds of Israeli women - can you ignore it?"
And immediately after that, blood washed over the sign.
It was hard to remain indifferent to this ad and of course it went viral.
She did not require an advertising budget in Time Square or the cost of a huge production, but only a creative head, a deep understanding of the new trend and many studio hours that created the long-awaited mirage.
A creepy 3D sign to raise awareness about the abductees in Times Square, New York./from the network
Orange balloons and a giant pacifier: celebrating the birthday of Kafir Biebs in Paris./from the net
Now all we have to do is wait for the next viral campaign to be a welcome campaign to all the abductees held captive by Hamas.
Natalie Zahar is a trend researcher and lecturer at Reichman University.
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