High Five: Brands That Acted Out of Category

What’s more out of category than a financial company giving out advice on sex? Mortgages are really boring and really stressful, and I loved that Habito took a playful approach to a subject matter that really isn’t sexy at all.

Oddbox briefed us to come up with a campaign that would raise awareness of food waste in the UK, and drive traffic back to their website. It needed to land in Q1, so we dived into dating and adopted all the tropes of that sector to create 'Soilmates' - the world’s first dating service for lonely veg. The app allowed users to enter the veg they had left over in their fridge, set its dating ‘preferences’, swipe through the suggested recipes and then choose a match - allowing the user to download the recipes and cook, thereby reducing food waste at home.

Burger King celebrated sloppy eaters with Fall Collection, which was a Hawaiian shirt designed to hide sloppy spillages. A fast food brand, tapping into high fashion with a luxury shirt for their range of luxury burgers - gem of an idea that their audience loved.

Why are Pot Noodles talking about potholes and the sorry state of the roads in the UK with Mr Pothole? I don’t know and I don’t care, because this campaign made me and everyone else laugh out loud when they read about it, which wouldn’t have happened if Pot Noodle had stayed in their category and did something a bit more related to snacking.

Attracting tourists isn’t usually done by tapping into the porn industry, but the Vienna Tourist Board decided to give it a try anyway. To protest censorship by social media algorithms, the Vienna Tourist Board published explicit artworks on OnlyFans - a platform known for its explicit content - and quickly went viral, reaching more than 760 million people, 2.5 billion impressions and featured in over 2,500 articles.