With the New Year now gone and Easter on the horizon, it is a good time to review how some of the bigger brands have been boosting their marketing in early 2016 (or end of Dec 15 in one case!). Whose campaigns have stood out and why? We’re taking a look back at 3 of the more innovative and quirky campaigns that kicked off the year, just in case you missed them.

We saw pop-up shops from the likes of Crème Egg and Skittles and live-streaming billboards from Land Rover. Take a look at the details below to see if you can draw inspiration from any of them.

Crème Egg Café

January 22^nd was an exciting day for all London-based Cadbury Crème Egg lovers, with a new Crème Egg Pop-Up Café opening in Soho, London.

The café is spread across 3 floors, where consumers are able to order takeaway Crème Egg toasties on the first floor, Crème Egg brownies and even Crème Eggs with soldiers on the second floor, and access a Crème Egg ball pool on the third.

According to EventBrite, the tickets were on sale 3 days prior to the opening, and were sold out by the time the café was scheduled to open. The café is open from 5pm Friday – Sunday for 7 weeks, and with nearly every day sold out, I think we can all agree that this is a highly successful campaign.

Land Rover

Land Rover’s Instagram filter OOH billboards definitely brought a new perspective to the people of London and Leeds last month, as part of their #Hibernot campaign.

Land Rover transformed the cities’ landscapes with their Instagram-like live filters on digital billboards, encouraging consumers to ‘see winter differently’. The billboards displayed live images of the immediate area and then applied their own ‘Land Rover filter’, encouraging consumers to follow their Instagram page, and get out and about to explore the season by taking a drive.

Skittles Pawn Shop

Wrigley-owned sweet brand, Skittles, opened a pop-up shop in Toronto on 26th December for 4 days. Consumers were able to exchange unwanted goods for sweets. Now, we understand that this campaign wasn’t quite in January, but we loved the idea so much we wanted to include it.

Consumers were encouraged to bring any items that they no longer wanted, and receive Skittles for them. The store particularly promoted novelty gifts, such as knitted clothing and cuddly toys. All items received were donated to the Goodwill ReUse centre in Toronto’s Scarborough district.

To extend the reach of the campaign, Skittles launched an accompanying digital campaign for those who weren’t in the area at the time, where fans could see how much their unwanted items were worth in exchange for Skittles.

We loved these campaigns and look forward to what 2016 has in store for us. Stay tuned for the best marketing campaigns of February!