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Life360 uses nightmare fuel to market location tracking app

Grandma rolling out of her casket. Dad getting arrested. Wearing your childhood jacket for the rest of your life. These are the situations Life360 portrays in their new campaign, which uses humour to show how their location tracker can prevent these worst-case scenarios.

A woman is stuck in the bathroom of a church during a funeral.

'I’m trapped in here! Get me out! HELP!' she screams, hoping one of the attendees will come to her rescue.

Unbeknownst to her, and the guests, her voice is carried through a vent situated directly under the casket of the dearly deceased. This causes chaos throughout the venue, ultimately bringing Grandma abruptly out of her final resting place.

You’ve got to love a commercial in which the deceased rolls out of their casket into the laps of screaming mourners.

'When most clients say "we want you to scare us," they don’t really mean it,' Hannes Ciatti, CCO of Alto, told ADWEEK.

But location sharing app, Life360, didn't just mean it. They said it with their whole chest in their latest campaign with Alto, 'Family-Proof Your Family,' hilariously showcasing worst-case scenarios of family situations gone wrong. And, in the process, demonstrating how a simple app could prevent them all.

The funeral mishap is just one part of three in the campaign. In this series of ads, the brand also introduces Tile, a tracker and competitor of the AirTag.

The second spot, 'Curfew,' follows a family’s worst nightmare as their teen goes MIA.

A search ensues, led by the father, who searches every dodgy street corner and bodega.

'I’m looking for a teenage boy,' he says to a couple of shady characters, who take that the wrong way. He's immediately arrested as part of an undercover prostitution sting.

'Isn’t this your dad?' laughs one teenage boy to another, watching a video of the dad getting arrested on TikTok. It's clear the son is oblivious to the drama that’s unfolded in his absence.

The 60-second hero spot, 'Coat,' is slightly less dark, but lacks no laughs.

We all know the anxiety that comes with losing something and having to face the wrath of your parents when the time comes to tell them.

A young boy lies awake at night, listening to his parent argue over his lost coat. The pain unbearable, he makes an unspoken promise to never take off the replacement jacket they buy him.

No, like never.

The ad takes us through the life of a boy swimming, running, growing, losing his v-card, getting married, holding his first child tenderly in his arms. And, in each scene, he's adorned in the same ugly yellow puffer the. entire. time.

These incredibly clever spots aren’t just amusing pieces of dark comedy.

They’re a way to position the product as something beyond a simple piece of technology. It's a solution to avoiding embarrassing and easily avoidable family situations that cause (often out of proportion) strife.

The brand exaggerates these situations to be the absolute worst nightmare fuel you could imagine, but in a light-hearted way. And this conveys the message that it’s just not that deep. In fact, the solution is as simple as Life360’s product.

Tapping into messy family dynamics that we can all relate to and laugh at is the cherry on top of a brilliantly executed campaign.

Other marketing efforts in the category often showcase genuinely bad (and depressing) situations, or 'the dangers of life,' like theft, says Tara Fray, Head of Strategy and Partner at Alto.

This campaign points out that, 'it’s actually ourselves we need protection from—we’re the ones who consistently lose the remote, we’re the ones who lock ourselves in the bathroom, we’re the ones who are always late.'

But you can sidestep all this trauma, 'when your family is protected from itself,' says Fray.

What I love about these the most is they tap into universal human truths.

Nobody wants to be the person whose little slip-up makes a mockery of the family, turns into a viral moment—or worse, makes Grandma roll out of her casket.

The campaign hams up those 'oh no' moments we all try to avoid. It serves up exaggerated chaos to make us laugh while subtly nudging us to take pre-emptive action. And, finally, it swoops in with the product as the no-brainer fix.

-Sophie, Writer

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