Cannes 2010: A contagious conversation

Yesterday I attended 'A Contagious Conversation' with Richard Pinder, Paul Kemp-Robertson and Jess Greenwood. It was one of the highlights of the festival so far. The guys spoke about the importance of creating tangible value and gave some great examples of creating conversation.

Durex Play – From protection to pleasure

Needed a fundamental shift in position.

High brand loyalty of 16-24yrs but as they got older they had no need for the brand anymore. So they created a whole new range of products that were all about pleasure.

They commissioned a survey all about sex and sexual behaviour. They wanted to liberate sexuality and make I mainstream – ie sit next to cosmetics on the supermarket shelf.

Women helped design products for women.

A zero base to $43million revenue in the first 4 years.

The case study from contagious.

Ways to change the conversation

1. Ignite the conversation
2. Own the conversation
3. Confront the conversation
   
4. Subvert the conversation
   

Ignite the conversation

Pepsi refresh project.

A consumer generated project that allowed Pepsi to create its own voice. People voted for funding against different community projects. The campaign prioritised engagement over reach and understood the brand rather than just sat there aware of it.

VW – the fun theory

They wanted to be less automotive and more about change and the great things in life. It was about changing the conversation around their brand from

Throw rubbish in the bin because its fun – noise was activated when the rubbish was put in the bin and 72kg of rubbish were collected on day 1 compared to 42kg in a nearby bin.

The outcome – fun can change behaviour for the better.

Check out the reel here.

Lurpak – Bake Club

Insight: British people do not cook at home like they used to

Pride never came out of a ready meal.

A communal cook off where people cook the same thing at the sme time and interact online about it.

Own the conversation

Advertisers felt they could own the conversation by yelling at people over and over again. The real way to own the conversation is to involve people in it.

Gatorade – Replay. No small games.

Gatorade flipped the tables and went for the cult of the amateur.

Insight: Everyone’s got one of those games where something went wrong.

Idea: Rivalry is scaleable. Provide what every athlete hopes for, a second chance.

Replayed old highschool football game to decide the real winner. Original coaches, cheerleaders, band members were there. Gatorade designed a training program strating 2 months out and the journey was recorded and broadcast throughout.

10K tickets sold out in 90mins.

No major injuries, broken bones or torn muscles – the ultimate product demonstration.

Hollywood has shown interest in creating a film out of the concept and the TV show will run again next year.

The no media engagement metric – without media, would people still choose to engage with your content. Gatorade took a product demonstration and turned it into a Hollywood movie.

Here's the summary.

Dulux – Let’s Colour – Own the concept

They wanted to own the concept of colour but take it a lot further. It was about transforming the look and feel of impoverished communities with different coloured paints.

A team of cultural bloggers followed the project and used the web as a global tv set.

www.letscolourproject.com

Nike/Livestrong – Chalkbot – post-digital thinking

People chalk messages on the side of the road during the tour de france to send messages of support to the cyclists.

Nike arranged for messages via twitter, sms or yellow.com told the chalkbot to spray the message on the road. It then took a photo and sent a message back to the messenger with gps coordinates so that they could see it.

It changed something digital into something physical whih makes it much more emotional and real. The way people react to something changes once it becomes physical/tangible.

Chalkbot video.

Confront the conversation

Domino’s – Pizza Turnaround – Transparent Takeway

Negativity around the brand heightened when a video of employees being disgusting went viral.

700k views on pizzaturnaround.com

80,000 more fans on facebook (1 fan = $3 of earned media)

Same store traffic increased by 14%

Marmite – The Marmarati

You either love it or you hate it. They realised they couldn’t get the haters to buy it but they could get the lovers to buy loads of it.

They used the top 20% of the lovers on facebook to become part of a marmite secret society and then use them to launch a limited edition product.

Subvert the conversation

Uniqlo – Lucky Switch – Digital hijack

You need to be brave and you need to do something that gives back to people.

They took banners – the most common and ubiquitous digital advertising platform and made them interesting and useful. They created a never seen before banner ad campaign. I don't know the technical details but basically you downloaded a plugin that was activated when you licked on a uniqlo banner. It then replaced all other advertising with uniqlo ads. The motivation to do this was essentially a treasure hunt/promotion where people could win items of clothing.

Essentially, it turned the banner ad into a piece of content that people wanted to interact with. Clicking on the banner didn't take you away from the site it just added value to the site you were on.

Charmin – sit or squat – public services

They wanted to subvert the conversation about going to the toilet. If parents are out and about with kids, kids give no warning at all, they just look for the nearest toilet.

Sit or Squat App. Essentially a toilet locator using gps tracking and consumer reviewed star ratings.

1600 downloads prior to the partnership and afterwards a 1million.

The reel.

Love Jozi – Luv Jozi – Problem/Solution

This is an example of what happens when you focus on the problem not on the spend.

No awareness issues – everyone in the know knew about jozi but what about the other people that couldn’t afford jozi.

They faked their own brand. Sold them in flea markets, street vendors & distributed to more ‘mainstream’ wearers.

The fakes were then faked.

After two years of running the campaign, they brand revealed that they were behind the fakes.

Luv Jozi now makes up 75% of the brands revenue and they successfully made a cheaper derivative of the brand without cheapening the brand.

Check out more at www.publiciscontagiousconversations.com

Cannes 2010: EA Games & the next frontier

A few stats & facts

•        In the US $1 in every $4 spent in entertainment is on games.
  
•       Consumers see value in entertainment, spending 100+ hours per week.  Think parents interacting and teaching their kids via video games.
•         75% of Apple’s app revenue comes from gaming.  Mobile is the fastest growing area.
•         43% of gamers are women and a third of gamers are parents.
  

 

EA Sports

EA Sports “experiences that unite the emotions of sport”.  The closest you can get to being one of your heroes is participating in an electronic game as your hero. E.g. Being Tiger Woods and winning the Ryder Cup (coming out next year).

For FIFA 2011, player images will be photo-like.  EA have also created personalities in the players.  So players on screen will start to play just like they do in real life e.g. a shorter player might have greater speed/acceleration and when the players interact, they will respond like they would in real life.

Time spent on the FIFA platform is 36 million game sessions = 217 million minutes = 414 years (as an aside Tristan hates these numbers… “they don’t mean anything he says”, I agree…. The gamer is engaged in the ‘experience’ not the brand in the background.)

 

How EA is selling in-game advertising onto brands

EA = Experience Affinity

1.  Top entertainment
   
2. Relevant reach
   
3. Engaged audiences
   
4.  Integration expertise
   

It seems most brands (Dr Pepper, Unilever, Doritos) all use the platform as a means for giving consumers access to exclusive content or a deeper engagement/more positive experience than they would get through purchasing the product alone.  It is a means for adding value to an audience who has common interests in the advertising brand and gaming.

 

The case of Renault & SIMs

Renault is overcoming the challenge of ‘young people not buying new cars’ by integrating into SIMs.  They’ve experienced 250,000 downloads of Twizy ZE to date and over 8,000 comments about the partnership on European blogs etc.  It is teaching gamers (and younger generations) about electric cars as well as improves the user’s SIMs experience.

Renault has used the integration to learn a lot about their customers and build their database.  They say that being pushed out of their comfort zone has helped them learn how to sell better and recognize bigger opportunities.

 

Measurement

EA games now has a partnership with Nielsen allowing brands to measure interactions and purchase lift in households exposed to interactive advertising.

The measurement will be comparable to other channels and will plug into people meter-style facility.

 

My opinion….

Still not convinced.  Its all very interesting and certainly ticks the boxes on reaching a very passionate audience but at the end of the day, its still just a very passionate, segment of the entire potential population.

This is a channel that needs to be considered right from the outset and at the point of content and creative development.

 

Abolish the Penny: a communications strategy for the WFP

I've had lots of people ask me about our Gold winning response to the 24hr brief in Cannes. Here is the transcript, enjoy.

Challenge
Raising enough awareness and funds to feed 59 million people is no mean feat. In fact, with $500,000 it is near impossible.

A traditional media solution is a) not affordable and b) not the answer. We are operating in an extremely cluttered sector. One that has exponentially grown since the mid nineties so much so, that compassion fatigue has swept amongst our target audience.

As such, in driving awareness and funding, our real challenge is not to shout louder than our competitors but to breathe new life into a tired cause.

As sad as this is, compassion fatigue has led to a desentisation of the world hunger crisis. Whilst advertising with malnourished, sad, sub-Saharan children was once so shocking it drove people to change channels, it is now part and parcel of our media consumption.

The opportunity for us is to reframe our communications and make world hunger relevant to people in the developed world. We need to reframe our communications because people whose daily lives are being affected by the global financial crisis are going to be harder to appeal to than ever.

This leads to our key strategic insight that:
People (especially families) don’t have money to spare but everyone has spare change…. Spare change that they can’t even use.

We’re not talking about the 5 or 6 euro in your pocket, we’re talking about the jar of 1 cent coins you have on your kitchen bench.

Due to the widespread economic downturn, acute monetary awareness has become a pastime for many people. It has led to a diminished consumer confidence and as such a downturn in spending and a trend towards ‘nesting’.

People have gone back to basics and are looking after themselves first and foremost. They don’t have enough money to make large contributions to the greater good.

Further, coupled with rising inflation rates, there has been a devaluing of currency in most developed nations. Indeed, even prior the GFC, the smallest unit of currency in many nations was practically worthless.

The US hold onto their pennies, Australia still has five cent coins and the British are stowing away their pence – but what’s the point? You can’t actually buy anything with this money. In fact our youth have never known a life where they could spend their small change on anything. It goes to waste accumulating in jars and dishes around the world never to be used – until now.

Strategy
We intend to create a movement to abolish the penny.

We will take something that is essentially useless scrap metal and turn it into something of real value. Food for the hungry.

Using the Fill the Cup creative concept we will rally excitement amongst schools and in turn communities to ‘fill a cup’ with their useless coins to benefit those who need it most.

Once again, we’re not talking about the 5 or 6 euro in your pocket, we’re talking about the jar of 1 cent coins you have on your kitchen bench. The ones that you can’t use for anything.

The strategy is simple – we actually want to abolish the lowest value coin in a currency. Rid people of the annoying copper collecting dust, alleviate retailers from hours of counting and give the coins a purpose in life, to feed the hungry.

Kids are best positioned to understand why we would abolish these coins. In their lifetime they’ve known no use for them. As such schools will act as the heartbeat of the campaign. They will be used as a point from which to disseminate information and the point at which we’ll collect the coins.

Execution
The strategy will span one year and will be single-minded about abolishing the penny to ‘fill a cup’. It will come to life across three phases (1. seeding, 2. spreading the word, 3. maintaining groundswell) allowing us to inject new news at each point so to generate awareness via PR and chatter. Our budget will be allocated primarily to the hard costs associated with the collection of money.

I love where I work & this makes me feel even better about it

Relief & the three things we learnt

This post is somewhat belated but was a piece that I wrote on behalf of Tristan & myself for News Limited. It recounts our experience competing in the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

Sitting waiting to be presented with the award that made years of ticking confirmations worth it and all we could think was “PLEASE, don’t let us trip over whilst walking on stage....”

Retrospect is a funny thing. As we look back to competing in the Cannes Young Media Lions competition we can’t remember all that much. It was such an overwhelming experience that the months of preparation, events in Cannes and whirlwind of emotions have blurred into one very messy memory.

When we were announced the winners of the international competition, for a split second in time we became minor celebrities. And during this time we were repeatedly asked how we felt about winning. As mundane as it sounds, the answer was relieved.

Relief for many reasons.

We had been given the opportunity to represent our company, our youthful peers and above all, the Australian media industry. A big responsibility and one that if performed well, would have positive ramifications for all involved. Whilst our trusted advisors assured us that having won the Australian leg of the race was an achievement in itself, for us, it wasn’t enough. We had been presented with this rare opportunity and we weren’t going to let it pass without giving winning our best shot.
35 hours of travelling, seven hours in a hotel room, a dodgy pizza and three hours sleep down, we sat at breakfast barely speaking. In fact, from the outside we must have looked like a couple amidst a lover’s tiff characterised by silence, poor appetite and enormous dark circles under the eyes. Far from a lovers tiff, we simply hadn’t cracked our idea in response to the passionate brief the World Food Program had delivered us the night before. We were clutching at straws trying to turn some mediocre ideas into something we’d be proud to present to the internationally esteemed judging panel, 24hours later.

Little did we know but we were about to learn one of our most important lessons from the Cannes experience - a BIG idea can come from anywhere.

Sitting in the foyer of our hotel we discussed our frustrations with our very patient other halves. Lauren’s boyfriend was ranting about the uselessness of one cent coins and light bulbs went off. We had our idea.

In the current economic climate people don’t have money to spare, but everyone has spare change. Spare change that they can’t even use. We would propose to abolish the penny and give the lowest unit of currency in each developed nation a real value, by redirecting the funds from jars and dishes on top of people’s fridges to those who need it most via the World Food Program.

Armed with an idea big enough to do the brief justice, we split up. Lauren to concentrate on what she was good at - constructing the argument, and Tristan to produce the presentation that would aid us to cut through the other 24 big ideas in the competition. This method of working was something we learnt during the previous round of competition in Australia – play to your strengths and trust your partner.

Having put our best thinking on the table, roaming Cannes for nine hours waiting for a decision to be made, then following the announcement, hurriedly making calls back home, at 7pm sharp on Tuesday 23rd June we found ourselves seated close to the front of the famous Debussy Theatre in the Palais des Festival amid advertising celebrity. It was here, as we sat with a sense of relief that we learned our third most important lesson from Cannes. Good advertising is brave advertising. It is about challenging the norms and putting out-of-the box ideas in front of the client, even if it means the less easy road to success.

So, what did we feel when we won the 56th International Advertising Festival Media Gold Young Lion? A sense of comfort that we’d done a good job. A sense of happiness that the long hours and hard work in our short careers had begun to pay off. A sense of excitement that our futures would be underpinned by this early success.

Relief.

Nat's perspective on returning to Cannes

Nat's B&T article

Yes we Cannes!

The last few days have been some of the most intense in my career to date.

We arrived in Cannes on Saturday afternoon after 30 hours of travelling. Needless to say we were pretty tired. After a small mishap with Matt & Ara's share room (mishap = 1 bed) we ventured off to the old town for dinner.

On Sunday afternoon we were briefed for our Young Lions Media competition. Caroline Hurford from the United Nations World Food Programme delivered the brief, which was to use the current "Fill The Cup" creative concept to drive awareness of the WFP and to raise money to help feed 59 million hungry people throughout the world.

Caroline's delivery of the brief was amazing. It was so passionate and inspiring that we left the room with an ambition over and above winning the competition but to deliver something that would truly help the client achieve their goals.

Answering the brief wasn't easy. We spent six hours generating ideas, researching the client and crafting a core thought.... only to go to bed unsatisfied and stressed. We woke up early and over breakfast hardly spoke. The atmosphere was one of greyness. While we had a decent, very safe idea ready to work up, we knew that it wasn't a winner.

We wandered downstairs and met Matt & Ara. As we were discussing our dilemma, Matt started ranting on about how much he hates five cent coins. His diatribe led us to our Big Idea.

We realised that given the tough economic times people don't have spare money to give to charities but everyone does have spare change. Not change that you might use for the parking meter or Coke machine but change so small it is practically worthless. It sits in a jar on the top of your fridge collecting dust - it has no purpose.

So the strategy: Abolish the Penny. It was all about people forming a movement to eradicate the smallest unit of currency in their country and donate it to the WFP.

We were really proud of our idea. We knew it was strong but we also knew that there was tough competition in our category.

After presenting at 9.30am we had to wait six and a half hours for the announcement of the winner. As we waited we were told that the judges were still deliberating which delayed the announcement by an hour and a half. It was incredibly nerve wracking.

When we were finally let into the screening room for the announcement, Bronze (USA) and Silver (Belarus) were announced. As Bonnie (one of the judges) started to describe the winning strategy I knew it was ours but hearing her officially announce it was amazing.

As we made our way to the front of the room we felt like celebrities. We were pounced on by journalists and had around ten cameras shoved in our faces. It was just incredible.

Following the 'hollywood style' mayhem we raced back to our hotel and quickly got ready for the presentation. Matt & Ara were snuck in the back door and were able to share our special moment with us. Everything just fell into place.

The rest of the night is a bit of a blur. I had complete strangers approaching me to say how proud they were and happy for us. Dave Droga (of Droga 5) said he wanted me to come and work for him. Henry, my CEO was bursting with pride and presented us with a nice stimulus package. It was just completely overwhelming.

When I finally sat down at 3am my body involuntarily shutdown. I couldn't keep my eyes open which signalled it was time for bed.

A night's rest didn't do much to make this amazing experience anymore real though. I am still trying to come to terms with what this all means and can't wait to get home and share it with everyone..... well not get home too quick!