Running in the right channel
Every year Cresta’s best give a refresh to the truth behind the line ‘the media is the message’. In our current winners there are examples that push physical and virtual boundaries. Sometimes it’s real and digital, reshaping our awareness of where communication can happen and how the most engaging content mixes media.
Work like this sensitises us to the everyday and at the same time makes it a little more magical. It makes the familiar strange… and tells us new things in the process. It can change behaviour, even change the world a little.
In two projects from McCann London, Football Decoded and Toxic Toby. we saw one integrate gaming and the real game while the other mixed the emotion of a teddy bear toy with the hard logic of air quality data. The purpose and results were very different but there was a common creative vision.
To understand the genesis of both, we asked the ECDs at the agency, Sanjiv Mistry and Jamie Mietz, who worked on both.
Cresta In your two award-winning projects - Football Decoded and Toxic Toby - there is great creativity in how you engage with people, as much as in what you say or make happen. For Xbox, you found a way through the FIFA block out, inventing your own media. With Toxic Toby, you made a teddy bear into a communication channel, a different take on the ‘canary in a coal mine’. Where do ideas like this start?
Sanjiv and Jamie Our ideas always start from a simple premise: asking ourselves how the brand can play a meaningful role in people’s lives. How do we increase value rather than add clutter? That doesn’t necessarily have to be in a worthy or CSR-led way, but could, as in the case of Football Decoded, simply be about the brand giving the audience a useful tool that didn’t previously exist. When it plays that relevant part in people’s lives, odds are they’re more likely to embrace it, share it, and talk about it.
How do you go about developing such projects… what is the process
We try, wherever possible, to encourage our teams to think of ideas that chime with a topical context. If there’s an issue that the world, or just a particular community, is talking about and the brand has a right to play in that playing field, then the idea is always going to be more potent because it’s inherently newsworthy. Toxic Toby was an idea that spread far and wide because it was a novel spin on a very current topic.
Do you actively ‘train’ to have ideas about disruptive media? How do you prepare as a creative in order to produce work that can be breakthrough innovative?
We don’t necessarily start out to disrupt a medium – the idea always comes first. Once we’ve landed on an idea with what we think has breakthrough potential, we then shift up a gear looking at how best to bring it to life. And sometimes the most attention-grabbing way to achieve that is to do something unprecedented that translates to disruption.
Is there a greater complexity to having a creative idea today than ten years ago? While Football Decoded won in our Billboards category, it is clearly a project that operates across several media, with a strong element of social. How important is understanding the latest media options as a part of the creative development? Where do such ideas begin and what path, or paths, do you take to develop them?
All our ideas are born from strong insights into what makes our audience tick, and we work outwards from there. It may sound counter-intuitive, but there’s perhaps less complexity in birthing a powerful idea today than ten or 20 years ago. The number of ways in which we can get our message to our audience has multiplied and fragmented, so we have the freedom to carefully pick just the right channels and ways that are more likely to be engaged with. Being at a network like McCann, we’re also able to draft in the expertise of specialist agencies from the group to help amplify our idea.
Is the very nature of a ‘creative idea’ changing?
It’s an exciting time to be in advertising, because nowadays creative ideas don’t have to walk, talk or act like advertising we’ve all come to know. A creative idea can now live in the form of a new product or utility, a type of entertainment, a new e-commerce UX… the list is endless really. It’s not just that we have a blank canvas on which to create; it’s that anything can be a canvas.
Where do you tend to recruit creatives from and is this changing?
We’re firm believers in the notion that creative ideas can come from anywhere or anyone. Genuinely insightful sparks of genius have in the past come from our business leads and planners. But still, as obvious and unfashionable as it may sound, the finest creative talent we’ve recruited has originated from ad schools. It’s only by learning the rules and knowing what’s been done that you can consistently break the rules and create something new
There has been quite a lot of coverage about the need for more attention to ‘long-term creativity’ as the real way of building brands and building real value through creativity. Is that something you actively work to encourage your clients to consider? ie. continuity of an idea/character etc., ?
In the early stages of a relationship, we work with our clients to unlock what meaningful role their brand plays (or should be playing) in people’s lives. This then acts as a north star for all future work. Whether we’re talking about the individual bricks of short-term, one-off activations or the cement of long-running ad campaigns; consistency when it comes to the brand’s meaningful role is imperative to building the solid structure of a brand.
Can we expect to see Toxic Toby live on or be followed up in a connected way?
Toxic Toby had an overwhelmingly positive response when it debuted. We are currently in discussions with various organisations to scale up and escalate the Toxic Toby campaign, as the issue of air pollution is as relevant today as it was when the idea first launched.
At Cresta Awards we realise that just sometimes great work doesn’t get entered or doesn’t get the jury decision. Is there a need for us to find a way to measure/treasure something more about the creative process, creative value? Is there something in your department’s archive that is ‘the one that got away’… if so, please name it and suggest why it might need to be reconsidered.
At all award shows, not just Cresta, we’ve noticed some barriers that can prevent powerful ideas executed on a small scale from competing with ones executed on a large scale – be that as an integrated campaign or across several markets. Even though scale is not usually a judging criterion, the larger campaigns can often suck all the oxygen from the jury room, and big ideas executed on smaller budgets struggle for their share of deserved attention.
Sanjiv Mistry and Jamie Mietz are Executive Creative Directors at McCann London
