Seven used the soft launch of its biggest trade marketing campaign, That's Massive, as a build-up to its Upfront last month, where the messaging took centre stage.
"The outcome from this campaign for us is we want people to feel it's impossible to drop Seven off the plan if you want mass audience impact," said Mel Hopkins, chief marketing and audience officer at Seven West Media.
"I think it doesn't matter whether it's B2B or consumer, the fundamentals of how you build out messaging and a campaign are the same. The way you change it is based on the insight and the audience."
The campaign came to life via Emotive, appointed to work with Seven's in-house marketing and creative teams in August.
Michael Hogg, managing partner and head of strategy at Emotive, said the agency really wanted to evolve the narrative beyond just talking audience and were keen to communicate the emotional impact that advertising on Seven can have.
"‘That’s Massive’ was a beautiful summation of that," he told AdNews.
"It's colloquial and the tone feels very Seven. I think the campaign is just the tip of the iceberg; it’s a narrative that can be used in sales presentations, in internal conversations, and that's really the power of it."
"The inspiration came from a whole bunch of strategic work, that cultural context we’re existing in with rising individualism and so it's never been more important to champion the idea of mass cultural experiences. It hopefully is single mindedly simple; I think trade campaigns often suffer from being more informative and don't think quite so much about grabbing attention and being memorable."
Hopkins (pictured right): "It's about the importance of ensuring that we communicate with advertisers and CMOs in a way that is compelling and consistent but also potentially flips the narrative a little bit from what they thought that we thought was super important," she said.
"I found it really interesting coming into the industry that at the heart of any marketing and particularly B2B marketing is good insight and strategy and great storytelling that you can deliver and back up on. I find it fascinating that you've got so many other media players out there and their headlines are something we've fallen guilty of too previously – ‘Australia's media company’, ‘Australia's most watchable’ etc – but why is that a compelling reason to purchase or consider?
"We don't have an awareness issue; our biggest challenge is probably bottom of the funnel, and people wanting to invest even more money in our platform and appreciate the massive reach that it gets."
On the creative process - the campaign is running both digitally and in out-of-home environments - Hopkins is leading the charge from the front.
"You've got a CMO driving it, but you've got all the key stakeholders from corporate comms to the sales team to Kurt [Burnette] and we had all the inputs we've needed throughout strategic moments and key creative moments," Hogg told AdNews.
"Internal audiences can often be the trickiest and the hardest nut to crack, so bringing them along, knowing that they are who this campaign is really going to live by and live through, was really important."
Hogg (pictured right) said that in terms of the work itself, imagery and headlines has been at the heart of 'That's Massive', but Emotive has also been looking to create a template of sorts so the campaign can have a life beyond this first burst.
"More broadly, there’s an image library is being created, there's tone of voice guidelines, so it's not a moment around the Upfronts, it's not a six to eight week campaign period, but it lives on," he said.
"In terms of the Upfronts themselves, the design, the visuals, the script - it was produced as a brand experience, not in any way as a presentation and so that was a huge creative process in and of itself. It brought to life the idea and the strategy incredibly well."
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