Jo Hudson, Planning Director at PrettyGreen shares how brands and agencies can embrace change to open up new opportunities.

Following the high fat/sugar/salt (HFSS) regulation, new CAP guidelines around gender stereotyping and ASA rules on how influencers should be working with brands, today’s marketeers are having to navigate the most complex set of rules ever seen in our industry.

It is easy to feel frustrated and restricted by additional regulation but, in truth, they are only a response to social and cultural changes that are already well underway. Interests in healthier eating, for example, have been growing for decades, whilst movements like “MeToo” and #GenderPayGap reveal society’s ongoing intolerance of gender inequality.

So, if consumers are ready for the change, shouldn’t marketing be embracing it too?

The way we see it, regulation opens up opportunity. It forces brands to think in new ways – to take paths that have not been travelled before. Where regulation has hit, smart brands respond with lateral thinking, reinventing their communication for a new era. Whether it is through identifying new audiences, embracing new channels or subverting the rules; those who win do so because they engage with the regulation and then boldly look for new spaces within it.

Regulations within cigarette advertising produced the best work for brands like Silk Cut

Limitations relating to media or scheduling can open up the biggest opportunities of all. Events, influencers, earned media and mass-market spectacles like sport and music can deliver similar levels of reach with more targeted content. Red Bull (the brand our agency was born at) delivers some of the world’s most engaging marketing via a channel mix that places TV lower down the pecking order than most brands would dare to consider. It is an approach that has delivered consistent and phenomenal global growth, with 6.8 billion cans now sold in 171 countries.

Red Bull’s world class channel mix has true media neutrality

From a messaging point of view, brands in sectors surrounded by regulation could take the boldest response of all by staring directly at the social issues driving the restriction (e.g. addiction, in the case of gambling, or health concerns, for high sugar products). An honest acknowledgement of the issues demonstrates empathy and could inspire innovations around being part of the fix. Sometimes this might involve a big strategic shift, or, in other cases, a new and more honest conversation with consumers.

Repositioning Coke Zero within the portfolio allowed Coca-Cola to be part of the solution to high sugar diets

Real honesty from brands is highly celebrated, but rarely practised

With the right planning, regulation should never result in a crisis.  The onus is on both brands and agencies to stay ahead of any new restrictions and, together, seek the opportunities that arise as a result. With more means and ways to communicate with audiences than ever, coupled with a deeper understanding of how, where and why audiences connect with brands, there is a playground of options available. At PrettyGreen we see only exciting times ahead for those ready to embrace the change.

Contact  hello@itsprettygreen.com

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Uni-ball, one of the UK’s leading brands of writing instruments, is tackling the student stress crisis by launching ‘Creative Escapes’, its new brand campaign. From April, the www.GoCreativeEscape.co.uk microsite will go live, providing students the tools to use ‘creativity as therapy’ to help improve their mental health and wellbeing.

Created and executed by Orbital Media, the campaign aims to increase creativity through simple drawing or writing tutorials, and, ultimately, lower stress levels. Focusing on simplistic creativity in the present moment can provide immediate distraction from negative emotion, and instead enhance balance and flow – similar to that of a meditative state. Working with some of the UK’s finest creative writers and artists, including Ella Johnston, Louise Allen and Scott Walker, Orbital Media has designed and produced an extensive number of video tutorials and easy to follow, quick creative exercises for all capabilities.

Creative Escapes is initially a six-month focused campaign that will be promoted via the brand’s extensive social media channels, incorporating multi-platform advertising, Facebook Live, Facebook and Instagram stories, as well as gamification, competitions, and targeted influencer centric collaborations.

The campaign has been warmly received by some of the UK’s leading major multiple retailers where extensive POS will be displayed.

Hayden Allen-Vercoe, COO at Orbital Media, says: “The student mental health crisis is bigger than we may imagine. One study suggests that 49% of students feel stressed out on a daily basis. There are various factors that contribute to this problem – as well as academic pressures, this is a generation that tends to spend more time plugged into technology, and less time experiencing the real world. The Creative Escapes campaign provides a perfect mix of online content to deliver engagement and consumer awareness, as well as the inspiration and resources to promote offline creativity and emotional balance. There is also scope to extend the campaign in further years, by deploying a bespoke app, driving adoption within schools and colleges, and attracting more creative talent, who are keen to support this socially responsible initiative.’

Paul Smith, Director of Sales and Marketing at Mitsubishi Pencil.Co.UK Ltd, says: “It’s been proven that we can use the benefits of writing and drawing to express our creative sides to reduce stress and get in touch with our feelings. Creativity is a form of mindfulness that offers a welcome escape from too much screen time. It is also the ideal antidote to relieve the pressures associated with the exams season. Communicating this important message with our target demographic of students is the perfect way to encourage them to enhance their emotional wellbeing, educate about Uni-ball’s vast product range and benefits, and ultimately, deliver increased sales.”

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Great marketing campaigns don’t happen without clients willing to risk going out on a limb, says Andrew Rae of The Black Tomato Agency

My cousin and I share a long running joke. Whenever we see an off-the-wall advertising campaign, hear the ludicrous name of a new band or are told the plot line to a forthcoming farfetched film, we look at each other and say: “Imagine the faces in the presentation when this was pitched!”

For example, imagine the convincing and coercing you would have to do to get ‘Snakes on a Plane’ off the ground…

Or, for an example from the advertising world, imagine ad agency VCCP’s pitch to the Compare the Market marketing team for the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ TV campaign. TV ads featuring an aristocratic Russian meerkat called Aleksandr Orlov, annoyed because people were visiting their site – www.comparethemeerkat.com – when they were really looking for car insurance?

Yet Aleksandr and his family and friends have become the backbone of one of the most successful marketing campaigns in the financial services sector ever – and the promotional element has seen more than a million meerkat toys handed out to people as rewards for taking out a range of Compare the Market insurance products.

The Meerkat campaign launched in 2009; within a very short period of time, comparethemarket.com was ranked as the fourth most visited insurance website in the UK, up from 16th in January 2008, while the site’s overall sales doubled. By 2010 the site had increased its market share by 76%, where competitors’ share had fallen by up to 30% over the same period. 700,000 Facebook fans, 22,000 followers on Twitter, Coronation Street sponsorship and rumoured record deals later it is widely regarded as one of the most successful campaigns of the last 10 years.

But can you imagine the faces in the presentation when this was pitched?

VCCP has won huge numbers of industry awards for the Meerkats; but in reality should we be thanking someone else for giving us Orlov? I think we should. Hats off to the client.

To have the absolute vision, the trust in a supplier, the confidence, the ‘arm-chancery’ to throw caution to the wind and completely commit to someone’s else’s wild creativity is where the real credit should lie.

Anybody who, like us, has won their fair share of industry awards will be very, very aware that the real winners are the clients. They are the ones who allowed us the free reign to be creative, to suggest untried techniques, to do what we do best.

We work with some of the biggest names in their industry sectors; it is widely believed that the larger the brand, the more risk adverse they are and the harder it is to guide them out of their comfort zone. But that is exactly what our role as agencies and suppliers should be – to convince our clients that we can help them by doing something unique and different and that they should trust our ideas.

Think back 11 years to 2007. A TV ad starts with a close-up of a gorilla. Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” plays in the background. The camera pulls back to reveal the gorilla is sitting in a music studio. It sniffs. It rolls its neck, loosens its shoulders… And then it starts drumming.

It is hard to forget the impact that the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad had in 2007. But just imagine that client pitch. Created to convey the message that “all communications should be as effortlessly enjoyable as eating the bar itself,” the ad was the centrepiece of a £6.2 million campaign. And in 2016, it was voted the UK’s favourite ad of all time in a poll conducted by Campaign magazine.

This is quite possibly the best example of a brand taking a massive (albeit calculated) leap outside of its comfort zone.

But did it change behaviour, and was it a success?

The commercial was uploaded to video sharing website YouTube shortly after it first aired, and was viewed over 500,000 times in the first week. As of November 2007, it has been viewed over six million times. Cadbury reported that sales of Dairy Milk had increased by 9%. A YouGov poll showed that 20% more people looked favourably on the brand in the period after the advert’s general release than in the previous period. It won a host of awards, including Pica d’Or for Film 2007, the Grand Cristal at Festival de la Publicité de Méribel and Gold at the British Television Advertising Awards 2008.

Wonderbra even created their own version of the film, with the Cadbury slogan, “A glass and half full of joy,” being replaced with “Two cups full of joy.”

To use a phrase that has now become common parlance, the point I am making is ‘simples’. Creative campaigns are nothing without the progressive attitude and confidence of our clients. Confidence in a) being bold and setting themselves apart from their competition and b) confidence in their suppliers to make it happen.

So next time you see the results from a prestigious industry awards scheme – like the IPM Awards – or you see a brillant piece of creative marketing, make sure you credit the clients as well as the people who put the campaigns together. They’re the ones whom deserve the applause, because they’re the ones who put their brands on the line.

Without courageous clients, our greatest ideas will always remain just that – ideas.

Andrew Rae is Head of Promotional Marketing at the prize and rewards specialist The Black Tomato Agency, which in 2017 won Gold, Silver and Bronze in the Prize, Reward and Incentive category of the IPM COGS Awards for the second year running. The Black Tomato Agency creates unique, brand-relevant travel incentives and reward programmes around the world, tailored precisely to the client’s audience and specific needs to obtain maximum ROI.

The Black Tomato Agency is a member of the Institute of Promotional Marketing, and Andrew Rae was elected to the IPM’s Board in December 2017.

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Brand Commerce agency KHWS has appointed Gary Brooks as Creative Director to strategically develop the agency’s proposition and support its ambitious growth targets.

Brooks brings over 20 years of industry experience to the agency and will be focusing on lifting its creative ambitions and developing the agency’s overall strategy to directly support new business acquisition and drive growth. Leading the agency’s creative output, he will play an important role in taking KHWS’s Brand Commerce clarity planning model to the next level.

Brooks joins the agency following a period as a creative consultant. Prior to this, he was Creative Director at WDMP, and before that held positions at OgilyAction, Arc Worldwide and OgilvyOne.

KHWS is committed to establishing its Brand Commerce approach as a point of difference for the agency, combining a research project with Durham University, ground-breaking technology and outstanding creative. Brooks will be a key part in the drive towards ensuring that Brand Commerce campaigns are practical and have a tangible, positive impact on clients’ bottom lines.

Gary Brooks, Creative Director at KHWS, says: “Having spent my career moving between network and independent agencies – and for a period working as a creative consultant directly for clients – I’ve recognised the potential of Brand Commerce to alter the marketing landscape for brands. Much of marketing is based upon behavioural science, but it’s not necessarily labelled as such. Brand Commerce is particularly interesting as it helps brands and retailers understand the why behind the decision-making process, not just the how. I am looking forward to being able to develop this approach with a creative strategy that will allow us to deliver outstanding and effective work for existing and new clients.”

Andrew Watts, Founding Partner at KHWS, observes: “Gary’s breadth of experience across direct, CRM, shopper and activation agencies, and his time as a freelancer, means that he brings with him a wealth of knowledge that will be invaluable to KHWS. Gary’s strategic and creative approach, coupled with the research we are conducting with Durham will enable the agency to combine ambitious innovation with aesthetics and UX.”

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Technology is heralding a brave new world of creative partnership marketing, but we’re not just talking about Match.com for brands. A little human meddling still goes a long way, says Richard Barnes, MD of Promotions at Brand & Deliver.

The technological juggernaut is unstoppable and brand partnerships is no exception. I’ve worked in entertainment partnerships for over 15 years and to say things have changed is an understatement. It’s also enough time to know what draws people to the industry; and – from directors to graduates – the scope to be creative is still one of the biggest pull factors.

Some of the best partnerships have been delivered before the dawn of programmatic, such as X Men and Reebok’s ‘I am what I am’, an inspired idea that used good old fashioned cross-referencing of campaign themes and messaging against the movie IP and brand pillars. This dynamic and memorable partnership was created more than a decade ago by nothing more than human imagination and creativity.

This has always been a people job, but now we’re faced with a growing demand from clients to do things better, faster and more cheaply. That’s where automation comes in.

Long after the dawn of programmatic media buying and the introduction of software that tracks sentiment across social media, partnership marketing is finally coming of age and embracing the power of programmatic.

The human touch still needed

But the fact that partnerships can be programmed in this way doesn’t mean the job we love no longer exists and that there is no need for the human touch. Optimising efficiency in our industry (which is what the programmatic element does) doesn’t remove the need for the creativity, contacts and negotiation that made us successful in the first place.

‘Programmatic partnership marketing’ is a bit of a mouthful and probably needs a rebrand; but in reality it means using the connections and insights that technology can provide to take a brand into new worlds, beyond the parameters of an individual’s knowledge and contacts, identifying potential partners that at first glance are not an obvious fit.

In partnership marketing, programmatic can be powerful and far reaching and allows us to scale our work more efficiently and consistently. We can come up with a list of brands that fit the brief on everything from theme to location to budget, based on a wide range of criteria.

We took an automated approach to partnerships on the Angry Birds Movie, which led to a multi-market partnership with the Peperami and BiFi meat snack brands, with the tagline ‘The Official Stunt Animal of the Angry Birds Movie’. Would we have thought of it on our own? Possibly. Would we have built the partnership that ran across eleven markets as quickly and efficiently as we did? I doubt it.

Far from removing the element of creativity from the partnership process, programmatic actually enhances it. It allows us promotional professionals extra time to focus on building creative ideas and ultimately putting together the best relationships, rather than following through on the first ones that stick. The result? Better, more interesting, more creative campaigns that take the concept of a brand partnership outside of our comfort zone and into a new world where everyone is a potential partner, as long as we’re willing to find the sweet spot.

Richard Barnes is Managing Director of Promotions at Brand & Deliver, a full service creative marketing agency delivering experiential, digital, film, design, partnerships, promotions and marketing to a range of clients including LG, Universal, IMG (Fashion Week), Ferrari, Sony Pictures and Three.

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Creative agency Above+Beyond has chosen to celebrate the realities of Christmas with an initiative which focuses on the ‘true scents’ of the season and wishing marketers a ‘Smelly Christmas’.

The agency has chosen to counter the saccharine sweetness of much festive marketing that floods the senses in the run up to the 25^th, instead choosing to focus on the real smells of the season by sending its clients individually scented Christmas tree air fresheners emblazoned with captions such as ‘Dad Burnt The Turkey’, ‘Christmas Eve Gridlock’ and ‘Gran Passed Out By The Fire’.

Executive Creative Director David Billing explains: “We want to celebrate the little things that make Christmas so special – but not the magical fantasy version we see on TV. That version can make us all feel a bit inadequate. So we’ve captured the real Christmas, in scent form at least: each fragrance acting as a little reminder of the moments that make family festivities so wonderfully imperfect.”

There are a range of realities to celebrate, thanks to creatives Jo Lindmark and Sam Whigham, who add: “It’s been a year of uncomfortable truths. So why not go with the flow and embrace the real smells of Christmas. From a pretty long list we got to some core fragrances that will bring a blast of the wonderfully average British Christmas to our clients’ lucky nostrils.”

A limited number of Above+Beyond air fresheners are available to win via the agency’s Twitter competition. Go to @WeAreAbove to enter.

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Sense London, the integrated and experiential agency, has poached Cannes Award-winning Creative Director Andy Day to lead the company’s expanding creative department.

Day brings 20 years’ experience to the role across a wide range of sectors and disciplines at both traditional and non-traditional agencies.

Day joins Sense from Cheil UK where he was a Creative Director and one of the creative team responsible for We Are David Bailey, the company’s Cannes Gold winning campaign for Samsung. He also led design on Cheil’s most recent Cannes success RE:Shakespeare, which picked up awards in both the UX and digital craft categories. Previous to Cheil, Day held senior creative roles at integrated agencies Draftfcb and Joshua and independent planning shop Naked Communications.

“I’m incredibly excited to take up this new challenge with Sense,” said Day. “Engaging consumers in the real world is an increasingly important part of brand thinking globally and Sense is pushing the boundaries and setting the agenda in this area. This thinking demands an increasingly creative and integrated multi-channel approach. I’m looking forward to helping Sense further shape their offer providing real solutions that connect people to brands in powerful and memorable ways.”

Sally McLaren, Sense Board Director, said of Day’s appointment: “We’re excited to have Andy on board. He brings a depth of experience across both creative and design that strengthens our creative offer, further bolstering our ability to respond to client briefs in new and challenging ways. It further shows our intent to help our clients connect more deeply and purposefully with their audiences through our ‘real world’ creative thinking model.”

Sense London is an award-winning brand experience agency that specialises in helping brands cross the divide between digital, advertising and the real world, creating authentic communications across the marketing spectrum. It manages all aspects of campaigns from strategy through creative and execution to staffing and evaluation.

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Independent integrated marketing agency Toucan has appointed Kevin Frost, formerly Group Creative Director at Momentum London, as Creative Partner.

Frost has over 25 years experience within network and boutique agencies including Arc/Leo Burnett, FCB, LoweOpen and, most recently, Momentum London.

He was one of the founding partners of MullenLowe Open (formerly LoweOpen) where he was responsible for building the creative department and winning new clients such as Morrisons and SC Johnson. During his time at FCB, he established and built the shopper proposition across the Beiersdorf business within the UK and Northern Europe, along with launching the new look Lloyds Pharmacy European network and roll out.

At Momentum, he creatively led one of the agency’s largest clients, Sony Mobile, and helped to define its global expression in the marketplace along with its creative positioning and approach for all new worldwide product launches.

His background has been in multi-discipline agencies and he has worked across most sectors with key focus in the retail and shopper arena.

Gary Rapps, Managing Director of Toucan, commented ‘We have been aware of Kevin’s creative reputation for some time and are absolutely delighted that he has now decided to join us. I have no doubt that the experience he brings, balanced with our own 25 year history, will mark the start of another exciting agency chapter. Kevin is sure to play a fundamental role in helping both Toucan and its clients achieve their ambitions over the coming years and I personally can’t wait to get started.’

Frost said: ‘I truly believe we are in such times that clients are asking for a more personalised, nimble relationship with their agencies. One where we can work in partnership with the senior team on a day to day basis, adding true value to their business and understanding the challenges they face both commercially and creatively. Smaller independent agencies are structured to be able to provide this which is why I know Toucan is the perfect fit for me and the way I love to work.’

Frost officially joins the agency today, May 3rd 2016, to work across its whole client portfolio including Weight Watchers, Peperami, Nestlé, Bahlsen, Fruit Bowl and Bestway.

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