APG Creative Strategy Awards 2009

Summary
This paper discusses a campaign for Nike which aimed to connect the brand with a new audience in a new way. Nike had developed a new range of kit focusing on the area of small-sided football, which has gained rapidly in popularity in the UK, and wanted to drive interest and sales among consumers. In an effort to move beyond selling shirts, the company aimed to make a bigger brand statement at the grassroots of the game, which takes place less on pitches, and more in urban enclaves and estates. Nike had always struggled to communicate with "urban footballers", who are a far from homogenous group, are unpredictable, and demand authenticity. Based on the understanding that football was an escape from the pressures of life, and on the world of "urban footballers", it was decided to take an unscripted approach, and simply film real-life games and events as they happened. As part of this spontaneous process, footage was caught of a young footballer "nutmegging" Wayne Rooney, the England player. A substantial amount of PR coverage resulted, and this incident also gave Nike a cultural cache with its audience. The moment was replayed over half-a-million times on YouTube, while the total bank of content was viewed over three million times, and 16,000 players signed up for Nike's "Show Your Five" tournament.

Summary
While Indian brides have traditionally been defined in terms of being self-sacrificing and dutiful, the seismic changes that have taken place in the country in recent years have rendered this image largely out-of-date. Similarly, while wedding rings have normally been made out of gold, the DTC wanted to encourage an increased use of diamond rings, and thus improve the revenues it derived from a huge potential sales area. Rather than creating a preference for diamond jewellery, it was decided to try and drive a broader cultural shift, in line with the new attitudes and beliefs of brides. As a result of the "Diamond Bride" campaign, 73% of brides said they would be willing to replace gold with diamonds for their wedding jewellery. Furthermore, 95% of brides agreed with the notion that "this is a vision of the bride I want to be. This is for me. This is me." Sales in the overall wedding diamond jewellery category rose by 30%, exceeding the growth rate of the overall diamond jewellery, which reached 20%.

Summary
Nokia was under-performing in key markets including Russia, China, Brazil and the UK, and it was imperative the launch of the Supernova helped redress this trend. The company thus aimed to get to know its users better, and found an innovative way to do this - looking through the material on their phones, from their friends and contacts to messages, photographs, videos and music. This revealed that there had been a re-drawing of personal boundaries, with people's phones documenting all the drama in their lives, almost like a celebrity magazine. As a result, a campaign website, SomebodyelsesPhone.com, was developed, telling the fictional story of three different characters as portrayed through their phones. This portal attracted 1.27 million visits, with an average dwell time of five minutes, and 8% of people became "lifelong visitors" who returned continuously throughout the duration of communications. Some 7,000 people also signed up as "fans" of the campaign on Facebook, with 30,000 mentions also being recorded on a wide variety of blogs.

Summary
This paper details how "Keep Walking", the global campaign for Johnnie Walker, was adapted for the Chinese market. China presented a great challenge to the brand, as the culture there was very different from the Western markets where the campaign had originated. To fully understand the potential issues, a four-level model of cultural difference was constructed and analysed, in order to yield the cultural, behavioural and ephemeral levels of Chinese culture as pertaining to both the whisky category as a whole, and the specific concept of "personal progress" which "Keep Walking" was based on. As a result, the endline of communications was redefined as a toast, or a "pact between men to help each other's future progress". This idea made "Keep Walking" relevant to Chinese drinking occasions and the Chinese concept of progress, and drove 7 million unique visitors to the Johnnie Walker website and producing strong tracking results across China (and Taiwan), beating previous norms.

Summary
Orange wanted to deepen its engagement with the youth market, but while the mobile phone was an essential part of the lives of this age-group, they were hard to reach in a manner that was both authentic and effective. The company thus sought to find something that it could do for youth culture that no other mobile provider could. Rather than the obvious, such as skate-parks, festivals and new music, it looked to an unrecognised opportunity within the current brand plan. It had already invested significantly in film through its sponsorship of BAFTA, and also owned the 'Gold Spot' - the 5-second announcement ad that reminded you to turn your phone off - before the start of a film. A high percentage of young pay as you go users frequently went to the cinema, and this gave Orange a chance to maximise the value of its previous expenditure at the same time. The introduction of Orange Wednesdays, offering two-for-one cinema tickets, and a series of knowing Gold Spots, acknowledging that product placement could ruin films, helped the brand communicate in a unique way. By 2006, Orange was the brand most associated with cinema in the UK, and seven years on since the start of the campaign, it is still seeing the fruits of being accepted, both in cinema and wider youth culture.

Summary
This paper describes the use of a new type of "channel" by Kent County Council in an attempt to communicate more effectively with teenagers on matters such as unprotected sex, drinking, drugs and smoking. The campaign had a modest budget, and was required to compete with a cacophony of other "helpful" messages bombarding teenagers on a daily basis. The Council also ran a large number of pre-existing services targeted at this age-group. As such, it was decided there was a need to create a channel which linked the existing messages with the services that were available. Having studied the interactions between teenagers, their friends and support services, it was decided this should take the form of an environment which utilised teenagers' most influential medium - conversations - and be somewhere they felt comfortable. Research revealed that most teens saw "a mate's house" as meeting this need. As a result, six disused high-street shops were converted into "real world portals" and each was named as a "House" where young people could come and request information. Visitor numbers quickly increased, anti-social crime decreased, and other Councils have since expressed an interest in adapting the project for their own areas of operation.

Summary
Eurostar wanted to raise awareness that its main London terminal had moved to St Pancras, which had been backed by a £1.2bn investment. While ths brief provided a lot of "new news", and a rational benefit of improved travelling times, the size of the building project was hard to capture in a traditional TV spot. As such, in order to captre the range of emotions that were attached to the new Eurostar, it was decided that a very different strategy was required, in the form of a film. Having considered traditional modes of brand involvement in movies, such as financial placement, visual placement and audio placement, it was decided to move beyond these tools to "emotional placement", with a story based around the feelings Eurostar could in some way help evoke. Scriptwriter Paul Fraser and director Shane Meadows brought the story to life, and the result was Somers Town. The film won a variety of awards, and ended up as the second highest grossing British independent at the box office. It has also run on major broadcast networks, and sold well on DVD, making it a commercial success. A survey also showed that predisposition to travel on Eurostar was 40% higher among people who had viewed Somers Town than people who hadn't, and generated a goodwill that will be key to Eurostar's future.

Summary
Sony Australia wanted to market its Sony Net Share cam product to young Australians. Working with Saatchi & Saatchi, it arranged for Hugh Thomas, a popular YouTube poster, to use the product, and encourage other YouTubers to create and share video diaries. The work drove YouTube traffic to Sony-relevant sites, increased exposure to Sony branding on YouTube and achieved 550,000 views and thousands of comments on Thomas’s YouTube page in four weeks.

Summary
In this campaign by Mother, Stella Artois 4% aimed to break out from its usual rural brand imagery and distinguish itself from other 4% lagers. It opted for a Sixties French Riviera context in film and in print to communicate the product’s functional benefit of smoothness and to provide the visual backdrop for the escapades of a central fall guy character. The campaign exceeded its launch targets and helped Stella Artois’s overall market share grow in two successive quarters.

Summary
The RSPCA was typically perceived by Australians as a charity with smiling inspectors which helped cute animals, but the overwhelming air of positivity also contributed to a popular lethargy, with a potential impact on donation levels. This was particularly damaging given the organisation was in millions of dollars worth of debt. In a highly competitive market, it became clear the RSPCA was actually underselling itself. The reality behind the surface was that it undertakes a range of hazardous tasks, not just in animal welfare but in human welfare too - from domestic violence and drug raids to violent individuals and child abuse. Communications which focused on these areas of its operation could shake up popular perceptions, and had the benefit of not needing to "spin" the organisation's role, as telling the truth was much more compelling. The campaign attracted mainstream media attention, and sparked exactly the sort of dialogue that had been hoped for. In the first three weeks of the campaign, the RSPCA also received in excess of $550,000 in donations, well beyond what the figure that had been anticipated.