10 tips for crafting a great communications challenge – the heart of a great creative brief

At the heart of any great creative brief is a powerful communications challenge that anchors the strategy and is the springboard for a creative leap and hopefully a transformative idea.

All decent agencies around the world have caught on to the fact that modern marketing is about ‘doing, not saying’ and this is reflected in their creative briefing formats.

DDB have their new ‘behaviour change’ brief, Crispins brief is centred around the key ‘Question’ that needs to be answered, BBDO have their ‘get-who-to-by’ brief and Saatchi & Saatchi have their ‘Objective-issue-insight-challenge’ format.  I’m sure there are many other great formats.

No matter which way you cut it, at the heart of the brief there should always be a statement of transformation of consumer/brand behaviour. And compared to the old days, it must move beyond brand perception shift.

Here are 10 tips for what communication challenges on a brief should do:

1. Have bigness and ambition, feel expandable
2. Be inspiring  yet precise
3. Have a juicy verb at its heart which is action oriented
4. Contain a powerful truth
5. Be provocative (or at least very interesting)
6. Have some cultural tension embedded so it naturally gets people talking and excited about the brief
7. Reframe a problem and ‘knock’ down the barrier or consumer issue
8. Have the potential for a platform thought, not just a one off execution
9. Stretch across media and time (Think being timely and timeless)
10.  Be short, punchy, simple & single minded

When crafting a creative brief/strategy, many planners think they’ve got a juicy creative challenge but in reality they’ve reworded an objective with some marketing fluff – the result here is creatives saying ‘your brief is crap’.   So, if you’re starting your challenge with words like – To communicate, To say, To tell, To convince… you’re heading into messaging world.

Below are some thoughts on a Challenge vs an Objective.

The Communications Challenge	An Objective
The most ambitious thing you can achieve	What you hope to achieve
Inspirational	Factual
Consumer/culture driven	Product focused
Consumer language	Agency suit talk
Overcomes a consumer issue	Meets a business number/goal
Resolves a cultural or human tension	Is straight up and doesn’t feel fresh
Drives behaviour change	Communicates a proposition

 

A few examples of some cool challenges that led to great work:

 Jaguar ‘Gorgeous’

To get people to aspire to a life of ‘new fashioned luxury’

Playstation 3

To push every player to their next level

Hennessy

To make Hennessy irresistibly out of reach

Burger King ‘Whopper Sacrifice’

To proudly put their love of the Whopper before their friendships

Honda ‘Diesel’

To dramatise the fact that this is a diesel engine from the company that hated diesel engines. Honda used this hatred positively

Google Voice Search

To inspire Australians to ask more questions using their most natural searching tool…their voice.

Austar

To liberate country Aussies from the shackles of free to air TV

Sonic Hedgehog

To make Sonic digital playground currency again

 

Seeking insights? Start by forgetting what you think you know

One of my key tasks as a creative strategist/planner in an ad agency is to generate insights to spark great ideas. Whether that’s uncovering consumer, cultural, brand or category insights -  it’s human nature to want to be seen as being experienced, smart,  in the know – so you often see planners jump to a solution without really exploring.

The reality is that 90% of briefs flying around most agencies today are not based on deep insight or understanding of the human condition, they are merely general observations, which is maybe why there is so much ordinary work out there.  If your insight doesn’t generate at least a bit of an ‘aha’ moment, it’s not an insight. If your insight doesn’t pass the ‘so what’ test, you don’t have an insight.

I’ve noticed a generation of what I call ‘Google planners’ – young planners and suits who believe that the consumer insight will come from a quick Google search.  What they forget is that the planner across town working on the competitor brand also has Google and also has the same search results.

Don’t get me wrong I love Google. They’re the most innovative company in the world and a current client of mine here in Australia. But information from a Google search or YouTube video will never ever replace the gems that can come from face to face interaction, conversation even observation in peoples natural habitat.

In a data fuelled world, I think the same can be said for social monitoring tools that many brands use to gain insights from brand conversations on the web. They’re useful and they give you rational understanding of the conversation, but must be taken with a grain of salt in my mind as they don’t uncover feeling.  As great BBH planner Jim Carroll states in this post ‘it’s far more about empathy and feeling than logic and understanding’

As a planner it’s dangerous to assume that you understand why a person feels and behaves the way they do without actually spending a lot of time with them. Quite often we don’t even understand why we ourselves feel and behave as we do.

Finding insights is not about finding the right answers.

It’s about asking the most interesting questions.  Trying to find tensions in culture, fresh angles in on the way people interact with brands and each other.

One of the best pieces of advices I ever received was from a great Saatchi & Saatchi planner, Mike Canterbury who sadly passed away about 5 years ago.

He believed the best way to uncover a powerful consumer insight, was to assume that there is only 5% you know from scratch. It’s a far better starting point than going in thinking you have the consumer profile sewn up.

Then assume that there is perhaps 15% you know you can easily find out – who is the key brand user, their demographics, when/where/how they use., who they influence/are influenced by, how they feel about the competition etc. Things that traditional research cover and most likely other brands have as well.

Which leaves 80% you don’t even know you don’t know.

80% of child like ignorance which you can turn into deep revelations, those kind of simple striking human truths that make you think, wow…I never thought of it that way.

So, spend your time playing here. Go to work every day with a curious child like mind. Get out of the office, seek inspiration from a variety of sources, not just digital ones.

Asking WHY should become your favourite question as this will provoke you to try and reframe the consumer issue or look at the cultural landscape in a slightly different way.

It’s here you’ll find those transformative insights which unlock opportunity and growth for a brand.

People are awesome

Thought i’d end the year with this epic footage of cool shit people do. Happy holidays !! See you in 2012

YouTube: Get more into music

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the guys at YouTubeAustralia (thanks Ernesto, Lucinda) these past few months on a project to showcase the depth and breadth of music available on the YouTube platform. Whatever your music passion, you can ‘get more into’ it on YouTube and we decided to showcase this music content  through the lens of some great artists.

We worked with a handful of Aussie and international artists as they created customised playlists of music on YouTube that’s inspired them – kind of their favourite musical moments on YouTube. Check out the YouTube channel here.

The first ‘Get more into music’ playlist was created by mashup artist Pogo. ‘Get more into mashups’ is an interesting playlist of  other YouTube mashups that have inspired his music. Some weird stuff in here especially the music jeans. Watch the full playlist here

‘Get more into vocals’ with Florence + the Machine

Watch the full playlist here

Get more into Aussie breakthroughs, a playlist created by Papa vs Pretty. Full playlist here

Get more into the Finn Brothers via the lens of Aussie band Oh Mercy. Full playlist here

Get more into Hidden Gems with Blue Juice. Full playlist here

Get more into animated clips with Josh Pyke Full playlist here

More ‘Get more into music’ playlists are in the works

Using YouTube vloggers to create influence

Alot of brands try to use YouTube vloggers with mixed success. Here’s two examples of very different brands who have managed to capture the attention of youth culture in very different ways. Skittles went down the entertainment route, Crocs the educational route. Both are effective.

Skittles  knows how to use the ‘right’ influencers in the digital space to help drive UGC. They’ve been in touch with character Trale Lewous a few times before to get him to help them tell their rainbow story.  In this instance they sent him a custom Skittles boom box and this is what he came up with. Over 750k views in a few days for the cost of a customised boom box. Brilliant, highly effective influencer content. Nice to see a brand who really gets how to use YouTube vloggers.

The other brand who’s used infuencers really well is Crocs. They use ‘hollas’ (girls who create film reviews after their shopping experiences) in an orchestrated influencer campaign called ‘Crocs are cute’.  They got 3 key hollas to review their latest translucent shoes for girls, asking them to go on a shopping spree to match outfits with the shoes. Relevant, meaningful, authentic.  Really sweet idea for a brand that wouldn’t have any traction with the teen/20 something female audience.

 

Ten learnings on how #coolyouthbrands behave

I am well aware that writing a post about ‘cool’ is fraught with danger as it is such a subjective topic and is the topic of annual contemplation amongst cool hunters, psychologists and people way cooler than myself (that’s not that hard by the way . Firstly, I’m no cool hunter, just an interested observer of youth culture and how brands are trying to stay relevant and meaningful in todays social world.

Having said that, I thought I’d put together some observations of brand behaviours I consider ‘cool’ in the youth marketing space. Here are 10 behaviours  in no particular order that brands I think are cool are displaying.  I’m sure there are others I’ve missed

 

1. BELIEVE in something bigger than yourself, an ideal young people can belong to

Love her or loathe her, pop princess Lady Gaga is cool. She stands for something bigger than herself and has complete conviction in her beliefs, which young people gravitate towards. Her activism comes through in her lyrics/music videos giving her ‘little monsters’ something to belong to.

2. Leverage MYTHOLOGY and MYSTIQUE in your brand narrative

One of my favourite Aussie brands is custom motorcycle brand Deus Ex Machina. They do a brilliant job of building an interesting, discoverable story around the brands origins. To me, they feel mysterious and never ever over market themselves. For youth brands, less is more in terms of the storytelling.

3. Be ORIGINAL,  creating tales and crafted cult

It’s obvious, but originality is and always will be a key pillar of cool. A recent campaign by K Swiss really caught my attention. It’s polarising, but that’s what makes it cool.  To launch their Tubes shoe, they totally took the piss out of the corporate side of sport endorsement. They used Kenny Powers and crafted a highly engaging tale that’s generated a cult following in the US. Check it out here

4. CREATE and REMIX CULTURE

Indie hipster brand, Converse do a great job of creating culture through their co-opting of hip hop music culture.  An oldie, but a goodie.

5. Enable STIMULATION junkies to capture and share their lives

Make no mistake, Gen Y and Millenials are stimulation junkies. Boys and girls alike. They are hardwired for risk taking behaviour. So brands like Go Pro, have tapped into this behaviour and been the enabler for self expression. In the world of action sports, Go Pro cameras on your helmet are the must have item. They are becoming mainstream but still remain super cool. They are the perfect compliment to the Red Bull culture.

6. Give youth genuine OWNERSHIP, appealing to the core and potential fans

 I think it’s such bullshit when people say cool brands have to be scarce. Brands like Modern Warfare 3 are perfect examples of a game which is appealing to both hardcore gamer and novice gamer like myself. Check out their recent epic spot here

7. EMPOWER youth to do more, be more

 Youth movement,  One Young World is an annual summit where the leaders of tomorrow start leading, bring the best and brightest minds together to talk about stuff that really matters.

8. Play a genuine role in making a SUBCULTURE better

 Many big brands try and co-opt a culture and piggy back on a trend. This is a major no no. Footlocker with their Sneakerpedia social wiki is genuinely making sneaker culture better by helping peeps keep on top of their sneaker game. Check it out here.

9. AUTHENTICITY in being real and doing stuff, not preaching

It’s also noting, that I don’t believe ‘cool’ is reserved just for the fringe brands for the super early adopters. Thanks to social media ,cool is now diffused to mainstream so much quicker than say five years ago, so the incubation period for ‘cool’ is alot shorter. I also believe that it has and always will be typically the younger creative class that start cultural cool which brands then often co-opt.

10. Help young people be more GENEROUS to their friends

In the social economy brands that help me do something of value for a friend are the brands are perceived as cool.

 

Would welcome thoughts on other brand behaviours people think cool brands are displaying.

#GoogleVoiceSearch speaks for itself in Aussie experiments

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the guys at Google Australia the past few months on an exciting project for Google Voice Search for mobile.

I’ll let the videos speak for themselves, but essentially we created two acoustic experiments with some rather unusual apparatus to test out the capabilities of Google Voice Search for mobile.

These are the two teaser videos

These are the actual longform experiments

During the filming of the two experiments we also reached out the the Tourism Australia Facebook community asking them what search questions they’d like to ask ‘underwater’ and in the ‘desert’.

So far we’ve got over 3.5m views all in and growing as well as a sizeable usage shift in peeps out there doing voice searches on their mobile, giving the technology a good old try.

Enjoy

Mini + Vice – All the Wrong Places does Tokyo

Mini has struck up a great collaboration with youth lifestyle publisher/digital brand VICE.  A great example of a brand that ‘gets’ the need to create cool cultural content for youth.

They’ve created an a web content series called ALL THE WRONG PLACES comprised of 5 mini doco’s showing adventures in culturally cool places around the world. The narratives dip into diverse subcultures, the first being in Tokyo, looking at the Dekotora Trucks subculture. The stories are mission based requiring the help of a Mini and  Co-pilots are being  selected via the Facebook page. Wiht 2.5m FB fans, engagement levels should be high.

I like this idea, I think it definitely taps into Mini’s target audience of ‘ independent free spirited travellers with an appetite for creativity and cultural’.

Episode 1 is pretty cool, great production values although I was kinda hoping for a little more. Will be interesting to see the social media engagement on the Facebook page unfold. Reminds me a bit of the Telstra Sushi Plane idea we created in 2010 whereby we sent 14 Aussie teens/20 somethings to Tokyo on cultural and digital adventure, using Tokyo as a live test environment for the new HTC smartphones.

 

 

Epic launch trailer for COD Modern Warfare 3

Epic. Enough said.

Parrot Carrot Safari – combining education and interaction via AR

Great example of a early childhood learning and fun  interaction via a childrens book using technology to enhance the education experience. We all know kids love chasing things, and the Parrot Carrot Safari taps into that behaviour whilst also helping kids to learn along the way.

The Parrot Carrot Safari, is a cute little  digital amplification to a new Aussie kids book by an old colleague of mine, Jol Temple (well done mate !!). It’s an Augmented Reality iPhone app that lets kids interact and augment the books content

The Parrot Carrot Safari app lets kids find  animals which have been ‘let loose’ from the physical book through the binoculars of the Augmented Reality iPhone App. Kids can then search for the animals around their rooms trying to  catch and release all the virtual animals from the book. I think this is a great example of how education and technology can intersect to provide kids both a fun and interactive experience. I’m going to get my little nephew Hudson playing this next year once he’s old enough.