The best advertising is creative, according to strategy chiefs speaking on a panel at a NSW Youngbloods event.
But at a time of shrinking budgets and less confident marketers, how do agencies convince clients to do "brave" work?
Marketers want advertising to solve business problems and create effectiveness, but campaigns cannot be transformational unless there is a creative leap pushing the boundaries - it's a tight line to walk.
The best starting point is speaking the right language, says Jnr chief strategy officer and founder Ryan O’Connell, because language has a subliminal impact.
“Words like ‘dangerous’, ‘bold’ and ‘brave’ implies some type of risk,” O’Connell said.
“Those words are telling the client that maybe they shouldn't buy your idea. Instead we need to take the fear away from buying work.
“So I banned the word brave years ago, because the greatest risk is making the wallpaper work - that's not going to achieve objectives and it's going to waste money.
“Clients just want to solve a problem, they don’t [always] want to be bold.
“And that's not to say that all bold work doesn't work, it does, it's just the language that goes into it.”
But to the agencies creative ideas only seem brave or bold because there is so much bland.
Initiative chief strategy and product officer Chris Colter shared how he convinced Lego to partner with action sports event Nitro Circus.
“Nitro Circus used to have an image of bikini-clad women with Monster Energy drinks, it's now gotten a bit more family friendly, but injecting a family brand like Lego into that environment was quite a shock,” Colter said.
“So one of the things we had to do early on was to justify the need and set up the business problem correctly.
“Because Lego doesn't need to tell anybody they exist - Lego is in 90% of family homes - but there's this little cohort of kids that still don't buy Lego and it's active kids that are on bikes or scooters, race gas. So we viscerally broke into their world.
“Then the next part was to take the client on a tour of the experience and get them to come to their own mythbuster realisation.
“Clients are not exposed to certain environments, they don't see the opportunity that they're missing out on - so if you can give them exposure to that, they can see it as tactile and then they can see the genuine opportunity from a commercial standpoint.
“But there's a lot of business case development you also have to do to get ideas like that across the line, but the work was worth it in the end.”
Fran Clayton, Giorgia Butler, Ryan O’Connell and Chris Colter on NSW Youngbloods panel.
Nailing down the most important measurement metrics for a client, case by case, is also necessary to ensure the creative work is being met effectively, Innocean Australia chief strategy officer Giorgia Butler said.
“For example, I had a client who was just obsessed with cost per acquisition, that was the number that mattered to them,” Butler said.
“And we never agreed that was the right thing to measure but it was really useful meeting them where they needed us to focus and was really helpful in keeping everyone on the same track.”
Ogilvy ANZ chief strategy officer Fran Clayton gave an example from earlier in her career when working on a Volkswagen pitch.
Her team discovered - through chats with people at the pub - that the uncomfortable truth of the brand is that it was seen as a ‘city car’.
So the strategic idea was to strip the product of the brand in a really entertaining way, which was called The Naked Ute.
“That was the first time I really saw the true power of a seamless strategic kind of point of view into a really fresh creative idea,” Clayton said.
“The campaign’s effectiveness was truly about creating both emotion and a fame effect, because it took off in that community and got a lot of earned as well.”
But how did Clayton and her team sell that bold idea to the client?
“In the pitch we sold Volkswagen on the idea that if they did anything that looked like ‘utevertising’ [basic ute advertising] that they would sell more Toyota’s,” Clayton said.
“So they really bought into just having to challenge and because their product guys the idea of stripping that ute they loved it.
“After that they challenged us to beat it, I don’t think we ever did, but that's an example of when clients catch the creative effectiveness bug they can't stop.”
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