 Digital, emotional creative connections James Aitchison 28 March 2008
Creative confidence
The morning’s chairman, Rory Sutherland, opened by saying that advertising’s creative community had lost its confidence. 15 or 20 years ago, a creative execution through TV or print was the undisputed answer to most briefs – an outmoded notion in today’s world.
Ironically, however, creativity is now needed more than ever, but across a much broader spectrum than marketing’s traditional boundaries. As a result, those looking for inspiration are best off reading popular economics such as:
These, he said, are far more enlightened than most marketing books and the business press, which tend to focus on advertising as a zero-sum wrestle between brands competing for market share.
“Advertising enables transactions to take place that otherwise wouldn’t happen”, he told delegates. “And your job as brand builders and creative people is to enlarge the zone that economic transactions can take place.”
Engaging with digital
Interactive used to be the bastard, executional child of advertising. But now it’s on a par with all other channels. That was the opening observation of BBH’s Dominic Goldman, who’s spent that last 10 years working as an interactive creative around the world.
BBH’s current approach is to assemble teams from different backgrounds – digital and non-digital – to produce digital work that matches the creative standards that’s the agency’s long been known for in traditional media.
He showcased a range of executions from the digital arsenal.
Banners: these have thrown off their bad reputation and become a good way to encapsulate the ‘big idea’. Bannerblog is a useful website for checking out the latest ads.
Creating contagious campaigns
Draft FCB’s Alix Pennycuick described a campaign for Nivea for Men’s shaving range to illustrate how an idea can become seamlessly contagious between the on and offline world.
The big idea behind Nivea for Men’s Extreme Comfort Gel and Shaving Balm is that it “makes shaving extremely pleasurable”. So pleasurable, in fact, that the brand created a pandemic of shaving addiction – or, at least, the agency did, via a guerrilla campaign and a series of unbranded viral films.
Help was fortunately at hand to those men who became hopelessly hooked. It came by way of a support and treatment centre – located on a microsite - where they could register to be sent a sample pack of Nivea’s shaving balm.
The case for art in advertising
Antony Tasgal’s presentation was devoted to calling for more art and surrealism in advertising. The POV Marketing founder said that marketing had become obsessed with “reductionism, runaway measurement and the desire for totalitarian certainty”.
Many of his themes were reminiscent of those of Sir John Hegarty at the World Effie Festival last month, with both calling on advertising to follow in the tradition of the most creative art through the ages, which has always challenged authority. Hegarty labelled it ‘irreverence’; Tasgal ‘subversion’.
Humans are not rational, he said, so marketing should stop appealing to their reason. We should see people as “semavores” – consumers of meaning - who now lived in “Extremistan”, a name for the complex and uncertain nature of the modern borrowed from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, The Black Swan – the impact of the highly improbable.
Digital Creep
Jess
Take Mini
Mobiles, according to US visionaries, will be the creative frontier of consumers’ use of digital. This will be boosted by Google’s current development of Android – a universal platform for mobiles to solve current software compatibility problems between different handsets.
Emotional connection
Sub-titling his session “being people friendly”, Matt Boffey (Arcred) offered some key points towards achieving creative excellence.
Six months on and we’re still talking about it. And so we should – particularly when you’re from the agency that created it.
It was Fallon’s Chris Willingham who unveiled the background to the creation one of 2007’s most talked about films, the Cadbury Gorilla.
The company’s Dairy Milk brand – a quasi-institution in
The brief was to revitalise the brand, inject some inject warmth, modernity and fun, and re-establish Cadbury’s reputation for generosity. It was, after all, a company founded on enlightened social principles for the time (workers’ housing and Saturdays off) and is still the one that uses real milk, rather than powdered, in its milk chocolate.
With just a week to report to the client, the “big idea” was not the gorilla himself. It was “A Glass and a Half Full Productions” – a production company that makes you feel as good as you do when eating chocolate.
Interestingly, the Gorilla script did not change at all from initial presentation to its media release. There was pressure from the client to include a chocolate shot at the end, which dissipated when extremely high Millward Brown pre-testing scores came back.
So what can we learn from a film that, while dismissed as “90 seconds of proliferate nonsense” by some, generated 300 spoofs, 12m views on YouTube and 70 Facebook groups, and led Cadbury’s CEO to announce to the City that 2007 was “the year of the Gorilla”?
Chris Willingham had 5 observations about what the film can tell us about the nature of new “creative ideas”.
1. Be original and be appropriate: original it certainly is, and it’s tied to the notion of generating entertainment that is as effortlessly enjoyable as eating chocolate.
2. Engagement, engagement: the link between fame and spend is broken. Creative originality is now the driver, and frequency can be generated by new and often free media.
3. Think digital, on and offline: even if a campaign doesn’t involve digital, you need to ask how consumers can pick it up and spread it. Be elastic, malleable and rich.
4. Do something: brands must do and not say, and move from control to influence. Cadbury’s philosophy is to be generous – and now it’s being generous in its provision of entertainment.
5. Solve the real problem: advertising people often identify problems that advertising can solve. Fallon realised a traditional campaign couldn’t deliver what Cadbury wanted. So it reframed the challenge, and moved the company from a chocolate manufacturer to a producer of happiness.
***STOP PRESS: MONDAY 31 MARCH***
Connecting products to services to consumers
Michael Tchao’s post-lunch keynote was about the work that Nike Techlab has been doing over the last 10 years to connect technology with sport, in the context of running.
Runners want information: how fast they’ve run, how far and what calories they’ve burnt. Nike first patented a device to measure running distances in 1986. And most recently, it teamed with Apple to create the Nike+ iPod – a distance sensor in the shoe combined with an adaptor for the iPod - to create a digital community around the traditionally solo sport of running.
It reports back information to runners during their run (speed, distance etc) and enables them to upload data to Nike+.com where they can view trend data, set goals and challenge friends.
The launch story of the world’s best selling running shoes and most popular music player coming together generated a lot of PR, but trial and take-up was driven via ads, special running events in key cities and roadshows.
Nike+ users have so far run a combined total of 83m km. And so far, 93% of them would recommend to the product to a friend and 70% of those say they already have.
Launch of the BBC iPlayer
David Bainbridge from the BBC explained the recent launch of the BBC’s iPlayer, which focused round a simple user benefit and proposition: a 7-day catch-up service to watch programmes you may have missed.
Based around the idea of “making the unmissable, unmissable”, the 2008 objectives were to raise awareness from 0 to 60% and get 2m users. After 4 weeks, awareness levels had already reached 50%.
He took pleasure in comparing this to a launch of a similar player from rival broadcaster ITV 6 months earlier – although did concede he had the luxury of a huge resource of uncluttered, free media time across the BBC’s TV and radio stations.
Crime doesn’t pay, creativity does
Andy Nairn from MCBD presented the agency’s award-winning (including the 2007 IPA Grand Prix) campaign for Trident, the London Metropolitan Police's initiative to tackle gun crime in
On a tiny budget, the objectives were to raise gun crime's profile and create a genuine debate, help win over the black community, encourage people to come forward with information and challenge the glamorous imagery surrounding guns.
The campaign included highly-targeted media, such as a specific black-youth magazine and the 6 cinemas situated in the areas covered by Trident. They also took a risk of losing credibility by supporting a specially-recorded track by the black musician, Bad Man.
Official statistics since the launch of the campaign show a definite decline in gun crime in the capital.
The science of turbo-charging creativity
In the final session of the day, Amantha Imber, “Head Inventiolisgist” of Inventium, explained that creativity was not genetic or innate.
And she then led the audience through 5 practical ways, based on scientific evidence, that creativity can be boosted:
1. Warm up: give people a creative exercise beforehand, such as an impossible problem to solve (e.g. think of 5 ways to bring about world peace by tomorrow).
2. Sit in warm coloured environments: red, orange, yellow are most conducive to creativity. They cheer us up, which generates dopamine which then helps information flow round the brain.
3. Motivation: financial motivation is not effective, as once the carrot is gone, so is the motivator. Praise, not rewards, are proven to be best.
4. Mix and match: creativity comes from working with different teams of people. Introduce new or external people to creative thinking sessions.
5. Be deviant: deviance boosts creativity – have pictures of deviance around when you want to think creatively.
Creativity: endless possibilities, but even higher standards
In closing, Rory Sutherland pointed out that, although the potential for creativity is massively higher than it was 20 years ago, the standards for achieving effectiveness are so much higher. In 1986, he reminded us, 17m Britons used to sit down together on a Saturday night and watch the gameshow “3-2-1”.
He also detected from the conference that generosity is a trend: brands giving people a genuine gift. So, give first and persuade second.
Finally, he reminded delegates that the case studies and examples they’d seen all have a selection bias – i.e. they are the success stories. But there are failures out there, and they happen. But at least what’s bad now doesn’t litter the airwaves for weeks, waiting for sales data to come though. These days, bad campaigns die quickly. |
James Aitchison, 
