Ad Unpack: Hoka’s Murmuration
Hoka’s “Fly Human Fly” campaign uses strategies that fly me straight down the funnel to purchase.
I saw a video ad on YouTube earlier this week that I’m still thinking about. In fact, I didn’t hit the skip button after my mandatory three seconds was up. I knowingly, actively watched the whole thing.
The ad was for Hoka, the running shoe brand known for thick cushy soles. Set to up-beat music, you join hundreds of humans running in the sky like a huge flock of birds.
This, my friends, is great creative.
The campaign isn’t new. Hoka’s Murmuration spot was released almost a year ago, the second iteration in their multiyear brand campaign Fly Human Fly. But it was new to me, and they caught me right before I was about to start my daily Sydney Cummings YouTube workout up on the big TV screen in my living room, in prime mode for hearing about fitness gear.
This, my friends, is great media strategy.
And guess what I did next? I googled Hoka. I browsed their shoes online. My favorite pairs followed me around the internet. And today, I clicked through. I bought myself a pair of Clifton 9s.
And that, my friends, is behavior-driving marketing.
What might be surprising is that while this ad directly drove me to purchase, it’s what’s typically looked at as an upper funnel brand awareness play. These days, it can be hard for brands to prioritize this kind of marketing. It’s expensive to design, produce, and place, and its effectiveness is hard to track. So instead, brands often skip out on the brand level stuff and emphasize performance marketing. Much easier to track, and clearly driving purchase.
But everything this ad did tipped me forward towards buying:
It reminded
The ad reminded me about the brand. Simple as that. It’s essentially 60 seconds of watching people run in Hoka product. I hadn’t thought of Hoka in a long time, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
It was visually arresting
Watching people running in the sky, their feet impacting the air like an invisible trail? It was like nothing I’d seen before. I was mesmerized. This is what made me stick around for the full minute-long spot, and what made it stick in my mind.
It leveraged a behavioral bias
This was a genius use of social proof, the bias we have to do what we think everyone else is doing. It’s why highlighting that your brand is popular can make you even more popular, and why claims like “9 out of 10 moms choose our brand!” abound in marketing. This ad does something similar, but in a subtler way. It shows a massive amount of people running in Hoka shoes, all literally moving together in a herd, illustrating the social proof rather than stating it. You walk away from this ad feeling like this is THE brand for the running community, and that you want in.
It tugged at emotion
The campaign is called Fly Human Fly! And yep, it made me feel like I wanted to fly. It’s built on a powerful insight around the real reason running enthusiasts run: the emotional high and sense of freedom. It linked the brand to that emotion, and made me want to get out there on the trails as fast as possible just to feel that feeling.
It avoided advertising pitfalls
There’s also what the ad didn’t do: List functional product benefits. Have a manifesto-y voice-over. Use a clever scenario that only loosely ties to the brand, leaving people remembering the ad but not what it was for. All the knee-jerk things we marketers sometimes want to do in commercials because of vague perceptions of what an ad should be like.
So because of all of these things, I tumbled down-funnel as fast as Alice in her rabbit hole.
Hats off to Anomoly, the agency behind the campaign. This is how full funnel, behavior-driving marketing should work. And as a customer? I’m one happy trail runner who can’t wait to get out there and fly.