Cutting through online clutter has never been harder. We’re bidding in hidden auctions, slaves to an algorithm and desperately competing for attention. You can surrender to boring, skippable best practice, or you can try for more: you can try to entertain.
Not every brand may naturally align to entertainment, but we can still craft campaigns that borrow from those formats. What if we thought of campaigns as TV shows? How does that change the brief, what we build and what we support?
A recent report found that of the top 30 ‘most entertaining’ brands, only one didn’t report revenue growth – two-thirds had double-digit growth. Being entertaining pays.
How can brands take advantage?
Understand your audience’s habits, what they like to watch, what they love to share and where they’re watching it. You need to understand how you want to make them feel and how you want to deliver emotion. How do you plan talent, production and set design? Where’s the jeopardy?
Where do you place the hook, where do you go deep, and how do you keep them watching? How can you provide a new and novel hook to draw even more attention?
You need to think about how you’re making it famous and the different ways they’re going to watch. It’s certainly not just through a 30-inch TV anymore. We’re living in the post-Gogglebox era – we’re watching content about content, highlights on social, episodic online video, influencer reaction videos and memes. Building campaigns this way is how to build for modern media consumption.
Mixing brand, social and retail
The reality of excelling in brand building today means mixing brand, social and retail – and that is building a brand through ‘lots of littles’ (an idea championed by Tom Roach of Jellyfish and Grace Kite of Magic Numbers). We need ideas that are rich enough to be a springboard for creativity again, again and again.
The old world of TV formats provides simple creative constructs for producing more. Grocers have already started to jump on this – take last year’s Waitrose Christmas campaign. It took the familiar format of a whodunnit, with a narrative construct that allows for storytelling across multiple channels, and offered loads of opportunity to play in social.
To cut through the clutter, grocery brands should seek a hero platform idea in a familiar format, something that can be chopped up into hundreds of assets, with a core idea that works from screens to shelf. Something that can work in long form and excels in short form. Something that gives time for storytelling and clear roles for product and brilliant product demos.
It isn’t about shouting louder, it’s about showing up smarter. Entertain to sell.
Ben Shaw, CSO at MullenLowe
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