Some like it sour
Can scent be a new frontier for creativity? Edelman’s seductive campaign for the Coop against food waste shows that a sour smell can lead to a sweet result
The ‘Old Milk’ campaign for the Coop in Sweden moved on tricky territory when trying to turn people against food waste. It risked literally offending their senses.
The core creative idea involved inventing, packaging and marketing a specially developed ‘perfume’ that had the scent of milk that had gone off. It was trying to teach consumers to realise the difference between when the product was good and when it was off.
Here Stefan Ronge, CCO at Edelman UK, tells us how the award-winning work came about.
Cresta: how. challenging it was to get the scent 'just right'. Is that a difficult smell to achieve? Was the idea immediately bought into, or did it take some persuasion? With hindsight very successful, but was there a fear of it being too risky - for example, making consumers think Coop milk is not as fresh as it should be? What kind of testing did you do?
Stefan: Getting a perfume to smell like milk gone bad was not an easy task. For our perfumer, having to endure days and days of sniffing sour milk samples must have felt like torture — especially when the profession usually is about making scents that smell great.
Working with our perfumer we spent eight months to develop just the right scent.
Getting the buy-in from Coop was quite easy. They are ranked as one of Sweden's most sustainable brands and are keen to push for change. Even though the idea might seem an oddball one, it was connected to a true insight: that people trust best-before dates above their own nose.
Here I must give credit to the team (Simon Kraft, Anna Werkell, Rasmus Keger, Sebastian Brännén, Joachim Ewert Barrén) and Coop.
We didn't do any testing on the creative or the idea. Instead we developed it with the team from Coop to make sure it was buttoned down in terms of research, messaging and tonality. They truly know their customers and trusted the idea from the get go.
Can you see this idea being taken further, applied to other products?
For other dairy products, sure. The food waste problem is huge and finding creative ways of nudging behavior can have a big impact. Naturally, most people won't have an Old Milk perfume in their cupboard but if they read about in the news or a friend tells them about the idea, and they go back home and sniff their milk carton, we are making change.
Creating an idea that is really strong in achieving 'earned media' is something that Edelman can pride itself on. How do you stay on top of the creative challenge to achieve earned media in a time of rapidly fragmenting and otherwise changing media?
It is key not to think about it in terms of media or channels but in the core approach. It's how we approach data and research, brand planning, creative, comms planning, etc. It's how we help build brands. Whereas many ad agency competitors see earned as a channel and something you attach as an activation with the ad.
We are particularly interested at Cresta in how creativity delivers outstanding long-term value for clients. The kind of work that Edelman does seems to 'go deep' into the brand with 'big ideas' (like Old Milk). How do you develop such ideas, and how do you get the trust and the valuation around them to substantiate the creative investment? Have you developed new kinds of data points or are there particular metrics that it always comes down to?
More and more of our work is on a core brand level. That's when we can make the most impact for our clients business wise; when we can help re-articulate what the core purpose of the brand is, and how this can become a north star for everything they do in terms of marketing and comms. When you get this right, the opportunity to launch fame ideas becomes much greater, because your way of thinking about your own brand changes. From short-termism to earning fame and building long-term brand trust.
What directions do you find most interesting for Edelman's creativity?
As our ideas are not dramatisations of USPs but instead founded on cultural tensions, we need to be even better in understanding people. Parts of it will be about using EPIC ( Edelman's Predictive Intelligence Centre) in Singapore and our teams at Edelman Intelligence to inform planning and creative.
What new things are you seeing out in the communication and creative space that particularly inspires you... and might feed into your thinking?
We always try to look to the outside world (not advertising) for inspiration.
Things like how deep fake has evolved from a fringe technology to de-ageing De Niro and a digital resurrection of James Dean. Still a bit ‘uncanny valley’ land, but it feels like we are getting closer to a point where you can truly use people as digital meat puppets. As any break-through technology this opens up all kinds of new creative ideas, but also quite a few concerns. it's inspiring and "new" but also a step closer to Black Mirror.
‘Old Milk’ won a Silver at Cresta. The case study can be viewed here
