5 Selfie Marketing Campaigns to Inspire Yours

This past week, selfie was dubbed the word of the year by Oxford Dictionary and the first mention of the word was in 2002 but this is the year the selfie has become most loved, hated and mainstream. Oxford even did an infographic about the word selfie and its origins.

In what seems a nod to the rise of visual web, the word gif (verb) was last year’s word. To celebrate selfies we want to highlight how marketers have tried to cash in on this trend and hopefully inspire you with some selfie marketing ideas for your next campaign.

1. Newspaper selfies.
The Cape Times newspaper in South Africa wants you to know that you “can’t get any closer to the news” except by reading the news they print. To make the point they doctored famous photographs, recent and historic, to turn them into selfies which then ran as print ads to promote the paper.

2. Restaurant selfies.
To celebrate their 30th birthday, Hooters restaurants, asked 300,000 of their former waitresses to go to a Hoosters on that day and snap a selfie to share on Instagram with the hashtag #stepintoawesome. They invited their customers to take selfies too and post them to their social network of choice.

3. Pet salon selfies.
A pet salon in Brasil wanted to remind their human owners they need some pampering too. So they took “selfies” of dogs with different hashtags like #instadog which they used in print ads to promote the salon.

4. Selfies in cars.
Toyota added a cause marketing twist to the selfie marketing trend with their “don’t shoot and drive” campaign. It included a message warning drivers not to take selfies while driving and educated them on the risks. To drive home the message they created an ad with a totalled car that had an Instagram flair. It shows a totaled car with a variety of different Instagram filters.

5. Eyewear selfies.
Warby Parker eyewear knew for a lot of people it wasn’t natural to buy glasses online. This campaign helped. They let customers upload a picture of themselves and choose five of their favorites. Then they sent them the glasses to try out. People were asked to share a selfie of them wearing different glasses on social networks and ask which pair their friends liked best. If that didn’t make the decision easier, they could post the selfie on Warby Parker’s Facebook page and the brand would chime in with their opinion.

If you need to coaching on how to take the perfect selfie, that is covered in this infographic (click to see the full image).

We love to see how selfies and images in general are going social and how they’re used in digital marketing, PR and branding. What examples have you seen?