Want your brand to stand out? Consider breaking a world record

It’s generally frowned upon to create ad campaigns or fudge campaign numbers with the primary purpose of winning industry awards. What if taking home a prize became the ad itself?

Consider the Guinness World Record, which allows for people and organizations, including brands, to attempt to go down in history by doing just about anything at all—as long as it is the biggest, the loudest, the longest, the tallest, or some other-est yet to be determined. The latter was the case last month when Nascar installed what would become the World’s Loudest Billboard in Times Square, according to Guinness, while Apple TV set a world record for the World’s Tallest Drone Show to promote its series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

For brand marketers, setting a world record through marketing serves as a shortcut to break through in a fractured media environment where attention can be hard to come by.

“We can say ‘World’s Loudest Billboard’ all we want, but having the Guinness stamp of approval really makes it legit,” Tyler Hoke, senior director of brand marketing, Nascar, said.

As some consumers reward realism in advertising campaigns amid increasingly common AI ad creative, some marketers said good old-fashioned stunts—complete with official documentation—may help brands stand out.

“In a world where feeds are dominated by AI video left and right…Guinness World Records is going to be increasingly more important,” Kevin Prince, founder of creative drone show agency Heads in the Sky, the shop behind Apple TV’s world-breaking effort, told us. “We wanted to plant a flag in the ground that this was real.”

Break that record

Brand marketers don’t usually try to break records with the hopes that Guinness will grade the work afterward. Instead, there’s a formalized application process detailing the required criteria, and during the attempt itself, official Guinness World Record adjudicators must be present to document the record-setting attempt.

Mackenzie Berry, head of the consultancy team for the Americas, Guinness World Records, told us that typically, the Guinness World Records team receives inbound requests from brands, and from there, the Guinness team aims to develop a breakable record, or find an existing record that could be broken. In other words, brands don’t need specific records or ideas in mind when inquiring about what’s possible.

“It’s a very collaborative process,” Berry said. “They might come to us and say, ‘Hey, it’s National Cookie Day. We want to do some sort of cookie-related record.’ And then we dig deeper. ‘Okay, well, are you looking to engage the public? Is this something like you want to create the largest cookie to get some PR?’ We work with them to see what’s their ultimate goal, and then narrow down to what record would help them achieve that.”

To break a Guinness World Record, the record “has to be measurable, verifiable, standardizable, breakable, and based on a single variable that we can compare attempts,” Kim Partrick, head of sales for the West Coast, Guinness World Records, told Marketing Brew. For a single variable, that’s something like “physical length or number of people” for the Guinness team to measure, Partrick explained.

Beyond that criteria, brands need time. The Guinness team recommends at least three months for the process to account for parsing “strict criteria for what constitutes a record,” and the ideating that comes out of that, Partrick said.

“If you’ve gone too far internally setting yourself up for a particular record, and then you get in touch with Guinness World Records and the record is higher than you thought it was, or it’s just not something we could monitor for whatever reason, [that can be difficult],” she said.

As for the cost, it varies depending on the effort and scope of the campaign, as well as the extent a brand licenses the Guinness brand as part of the campaign, Partrick said.

Record-worthy?

Ad agency 72andSunny started work in November on Nascar’s record-setting billboard attempt, working with engine builders Guru House on a billboard with an engine that could rev up to 133.7 decibels over the course of 30 seconds. The attempt itself created—and set—a new category, rather than breaking an existing one, according to Zach Hilder, chief creative officer at 72andSunny. The effort ultimately took place on February 10, and the brand was subsequently able to tout the record in press materials and interviews to kick off the stock-car-racing league’s new season.

“We’ve won a lot of industry awards… we thought it was super cool that an ad could actually break a record,”Hilder said.

For Apple TV and Heads in the Sky, the team went back and forth to decide what would be a Guinness World Record that matched a show about gigantic monsters before ultimately landing on the tallest drone formation.

“[It’s a] very natural fit for us given the scale of Godzilla and King Kong in the middle of Hollywood,” Prince said. “We set parameters that were realistic for the show itself, knowing that we were potentially going to set this record without straining any of the technicians.”

The drone show took place over the course of 15 minutes, and the drones had to be in the air for a certain amount of time to be able to set the record, Prince told us, who noted that “the adjudicator was meticulous” with the details.

“We wanted to set this record,” Prince said. “It’s possible that someone could break it any day this year. But for the moment…it really was very effective.”

It can also be fun for everyone involved. Prince said that after the effort was verified as a record, there was a small ceremony memorializing the record and a framed certificate.

“It was like winning an Academy Award,” he said. “It was a really great moment.”