Extreme Sports Commercial

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Camp Mesorah
Video by Shmuel Hoffman

In Part I of the series “How to Create a Branding Campaign To Dominate Your Market” we went over that it is important to give your brand a distinctive “face” that lets your clients and customers distinguish you from your competition. We also discussed that most non- profit brands fail to brand their organization properly. They are afraid that certain demographics and audiences might be excluded from their chosen message. The consequence of this fear is that if you have a vague or too general message, you don’t have any message. You then lose a lot of prospectives because people want to connect to a brand that stands for something rather than for nothing. If you didn’t get a chance to check out that pos,t here is the link to Part I: How to Create a Branding Campaign to Dominate Your Market.

Be Provocative
In today’s post I want to address that fear that if you’re too specific in your marketing and branding, you might lose certain demographics. Furthermore, I want to show you, using this new video ad for Camp Mesorah, how we took the rebranding for them to another level. We produced a marketing commercial that is more provocative than the typical video ad for summer camps.

See, if you look at most summer camps’ branding, they all look kind of the same. They show off the fun and activities in their videos, brochures and their websites. The problem is that producing a great-looking promo video alone isn’t enough, because most camps have caught on to that strategy and are also producing great-looking video ads. Have you watched them? They all look and feel the same. And that does not just apply to the field of summer camps. The same is true for universities, schools, and nonproftit brands in general. One of the reasons for this is that they just copy one from another: “Oh this looks good; lets do the same.” But doing the same as the competition will not get you ahead of the competition.

Be Specific
Now, last time I showed you how we advertised an unbranded summer camp with a “sports” focused marketing commercial. The point here is that we just took their specialty, being a sports camp, and started communicating that in a video ad. Now we want to bring it to the next level. Sports is a widespread activity among teens, right? Especially here in America with baseball, football, basketball and hockey. We are a nation of strong and obsessed sports fans. But teens for whom competitive sports might be of secondary interest, will still seek thrilling, action-packed, activities. We didn’t want to digress from the “sports” aspect of Camp Mesorah, so, in this new commercial, we put “extreme” sports in the foreground as opposed to the competitive team sports that we featured in the first ad. Here we focus on Camp Mesorah’s other activities like biking, zip lining and water rafting. Although these are sports, their main aspect is the thrill and the fun of doing them, without the competitive element.

So, for this specific type of teen, we wanted to show that Camp Mesorah has more than the usual activities like arts & crafts, pottery, cooking etc. by highlighting Camp Menorah’s arsenal of fun and thrilling extreme sports. And, thats exactly what we are pushing here. Even though we are branding it as “The Sports Camp” this doesn’t mean that people who are not primarily interested in traditional competitive sports wouldn’t be interested in having fun through some sort of sporting activity.

Do you see what I’m doing? Instead of just branding it so narrowly, I use the branding theme – in this case “ Sports”- and create campaigns that integrate a lot of other aspects.

Now, to give you a heads up, the third commercial will be dealing with soft values like making friends, gaining skills, values etc. Here, we will use “ Sports” as the overarching focus of the camp, but then explore different aspects like skill-building, resilience, friendship, and being challenged within the theme.

Take Action & Leadership
I know this can be overwhelming for many brands, and that’s one of the reasons why so many organizations don’t put in the work necessary to figure out what they want to be, to whom they want to cater, and how can they leave their competition behind by being different. But, if you do the work, it will pay back tenfold. How? In the case of Camp Mesorah we strongly believe that they will become the #1 camp very soon. Why? Because they are standing for something; sports, extremes, thrills and fun. All things that kids of all ages are looking for. Since they are using those intrinsic values as their branding perception, it would be foolish if another camp would try to follow in their steps in becoming the same “sportive camp.” At this point they’ve already been beaten to the punch by Mesorah.