Creative Generosity Earns More Love

PDA sees business challenges as relationship challenges, and opportunities for brand passion

By David Yankelewitz, Co-Founder & Executive Creative Director of PDA

Like a lot of creatives, I’ve been writing, drawing, and making art since I was a kid. Not to get all messianic, but it’s what I was put on this earth to do. But as much as I’d like to credit my career to ungodly talent, I owe my professional success to something else: generosity.

I’ve never had all the creative answers?—?thankfully I’ve had a great partner, great teams, and great clients?—?but it’s always felt right to me to make advertising that puts the audience first.

After 15 years in the biz, my take is that every brand is in a massive poly relationship with consumers. And brands are thirsty for endless love, constantly going after New Relationship Energy with whatever next Gen (Z, Alpha, etc) and niche community willing to take them home.

The most seductive brands attract millions of lovers who spend their money buying products, and their time liking, watching, and sharing branded content, engaging with branded events & experiences, and promoting the brand through merch.

Brand building is just relationship building. And we all know the fundamentals of a long & loving relationship. Whether a brand is trying to deepen love and loyalty among current customers or spark passion with new ones, I truly/madly/deeply believe the rules of relationships apply.

That’s why my co-founder Aaron and I named our agency PDA. ?? Our creative career has always been as simple as following our hearts. Unroll your eyes because it’s true!

We approach every brief pretty much the same way:

What Generous/Charming/Heart-Stopping [BLANK] can The Brand Do/Make/Offer that we KNOW IN OUR HEARTS will be loved by The Target Audience/Community to Achieve The Campaign Objectives

No matter what the business challenge, making love is always the answer.

Smaller start-up clients are great catches, but no one knows they exist. Other clients are single and looking to mingle with a community they’ve never reached before. And we’ve worked with many big brands trying to rekindle the spark with modern audiences who aren’t that into them.

PDA’S 5 LOVE LANGUAGES FOR BRAND-BUILDING

Since every relationship or situationship is different, PDA approaches every brief open to whatever size, shape, execution, channel, and talented team is best for the job. But all of our creative solutions speak at least 1 (and usually several) of these well-known Love Languages…

Acts Of Service?

Actions speak louder than words in any relationship. Especially between a brand and its audience(s), because most brands DON’T take big buzzy actions to benefit their customers. Most brands just speak to them—or worse, at them.

At PDA, we believe in the power of Public Displays of Affection. Because we’ve seen them work time and time again. In today’s values-driven market, modern consumers are demanding more than words from the brands they support. When brands make meaningful public actions, they prove their values on a grand scale, with massive impact.

Our fave example is the metaverse football stadium we built in Fortnite, as ECDs leading Verizon at R/GA, in partnership with Momentum. It was Super Bowl time, and Verizon needed to convince gamers their new 5G service changes the game for mobile gaming. Cheesy pun intended.

We created a mindblowing Act of Service for the gaming community. Verizon 5G Super Bowl Stadium in Fortnite was the biggest playable structure ever built by a brand, in the world’s biggest game. It was a creative replica of that year’s real Super Bowl stadium?—?Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium?—?and it was open to Fortnite’s 30 million daily users for the week leading up to Super Bowl Sunday.

The fully explorable stadium hosted nightly gaming livestreams on Twitch, where pro gamers went head-to-head with NFL players. NFL players also hosted avatar-to-avatar meet-and-greets with fans, and scavenger hunts for gaming-related giveaways.

We built something that both the football and the gaming community loved, on their favorite platforms. It was a stadium-shaped Act of Service: a virtual place to play and celebrate in a pandemic year when IRL events and real stadium attendance were drastically reduced.

And our clients loved the results: 36 billion impressions, 40 million virtual visitors to the stadium, and #1 share of voice for Verizon during Super Bowl week.

Gift Giving

Like Acts of Service, generous gestures go so much farther than just nagging at whatever audience a brand is trying to reach. So we’re always asking ourselves how we can shower people with gifts, because it’s a tried and true way to people’s hearts.

Branded gifts can be physical or gestural, exclusive or widely available, actions, objects, content, or any form of generosity that arouses passion in a recipient.

Sometimes the perfect gift is a bacon-scent alarm clock dongle that plugs into your iPhone and wakes you up to the scent & sound of sizzling bacon. I can say that with confidence, based on the reception Oscar Mayer received for Wake Up & Smell The Bacon, an activation we launched as GCDs leading the account at 360i.

We knew our Wake Up & Smell The Bacon devices would break the bacon Internet when we invented, designed, fabricated, and packaged 5,000 of the dongles and gifted them to “bacon beta testers” who were passionate enough to apply for one on Oscar Mayer's website.

We promoted the WUSB devices with a bacon-themed perfume ad parody that sold Oscar Mayer bacon better than any traditional spot?—?because it included a ridiculous/hilarious gift designed just for its audience. The campaign received 500 million impressions, 200,000 online applications, and a 2700% spike in brand social mentions.

Oscar Mayer Sizzl was another gift for bacon fans that we gave away to great fanfare. Oscar Mayer’s brand platform was “the bacon for bacon lovers,” so we created a real bacon dating app for the most discriminating bacon lovers. Sizzl was an unexpected gesture for the bacon-loving community, released when community-based dating apps for Jews, Christians, and farmers were just popping up. It generated 900 million impressions and a 5.4% spike in sales of Oscar Mayer bacon, and even a few bacon marriages.

Quality Time

Meaningful companionship isn’t that important if all you’re looking for is a one night stand. But for brands seeking lasting relationships, QT is key. At PDA, we think of Quality Time as any opportunity for people to voluntarily spend time with a brand through content, entertainment, branded games, or experiences?—?and sometimes even just an innovative UX can do the job.

Our ongoing creative work for Waze is the essence of Quality Time, and it’s especially valuable because Waze doesn’t advertise. Waze has about 150 million active users, and the brand is laser-focused on keeping things spicy with all those lovers. It’s been PDA’s pleasure to concept, script, cast VO talent, illustrate, and design fun characters you can choose to give you directions.

We’ve done an Alien, a Hard-Boiled Noir Detective, a Spicy Gingerbread Man for the holidays, a Scary Clown for Halloween, and a spirit guide who gives custom directions based on your Zodiac sign. All these characters are in the Customize Your Drive section of the app, and their only purpose is increasing love, loyalty, and Quality Time with Waze’s millions of users.

Physical Touch

For some brands, sampling and other forms of Physical Touch are key conversion drivers. For many others, fabrications and physical objects, products, collectibles, and limited drops can be surprising and special ways to extend a brand’s IP and give it tactile value. Because just like every person, doesn’t every brand want to be held?

The Wake Up & Smell The Bacon dongles that we fabricated for Oscar Mayer went viral not only because they were unexpected gifts, but also because they were beautifully designed physical objects that became instant collectibles.

The remote-controlled Wiener Rover that we designed and built for Oscar Mayer is another fun example of Physical Touch. It was a summer sampling activation in the form of an off-road vehicle the size of an ATV, with a warming compartment and built-in condiment holders. The Wiener Rover delivered fresh hot dogs in buns to anyone who tweeted at it from somewhere the big Wienermobile couldn’t reach: beaches, parks, campsites, etc. People loved the rover so much that Oscar Mayer turned it into a line of toys for the holidays.

Mini Deliveries is a third charming example of Physical Touch that we created while leading Oreo at 360i. Oreo needed support for the launch of Oreo Minis, tiny snackable Oreos that you eat by the handful. The overall campaign idea was “Appreciate The Little Things,” and our Mini Deliveries activation let people send a sweet little something to someone they appreciate: a single Oreo Mini, individually packaged in a tiny shipping box about the size of a kid’s wooden block, with a custom note. That low-budget opportunity for Physical Touch and Gift Giving sold out in 5 minutes and earned Oreo 12 million impressions and 100,000 site visitors.

Words Of Affirmation

This last Love Language is PDA’s high-EQ take on “Traditional Advertising.” When a brand is only offering its audience words, stories, and ads, we think those Words of Affirmation need to be more moving than everything else screaming for people’s attention. It’s hot when a brand puts itself out there, but only if it shows an intimate understanding of who it’s trying to woo.

That was our approach for Loop Earplugs, a European brand that makes stylish audio protection for concerts, dance parties, noisy trains and bars, meditation, focus, and sleep.

Loop’s products enhance the sounds you want to hear and filter the noise you don’t. So when Loop needed to introduce itself to New Yorkers with its first-ever brand campaign, our Words of Affirmation proved Loop’s support for all the loud activities we love in life, with bold visuals that expressed the product’s highest order benefits: SHUT UP NOISE, TURN UP SOUND.

The campaign ran on social, digital, and programmatic OOH across NYC, featuring big city noises we all want to shut up (loud people on the subway, neighbors having loud sex) along with high-volume activities Loop encourages (motorcycling, house parties). Our relatable Words of Affirmation denouncing noise and celebrating sound led to 300 million impressions and a 32% lift in brand awareness.

TRUE BRAND LOVE IS WORTH THE EFFORT

There’s always going to be a need for brand-building that works how it always has: a paid media interruption with a message that sells. But we all know that today’s media, social, cultural, Internet, information, disinformation, entertainment, and everything landscape is fractured AF. The mass channels and straight sales messages that brands have counted on since Mad Men just aren’t turning people on the way they used to.

If a brand’s relationship with its consumers is purely transactional, the brand is missing out. And if a brand’s relationship with the wider world is selfish?—?it only ever asks without giving?—?it’s being old-fashioned. How can it be truly loved by modern consumers who expect more, and who are navigating a media landscape that demands more than the same traditional approach?

We’ve all been on disastrous first dates when we spent all night bragging and selfishly took the last bite of fried calamari. Not a good look. Earning love, loyalty, and brand passion starts with showing generosity.

That’s a lesson Aaron and I have learned the hard way through our careers. We’ve rarely been able to rely on massive paid media budgets that can buy attention without regard for the desires of our audience. We’ve had to make advertising that’s loved so passionately it propels itself through culture, PR, and earned likes, shares, and views on people’s feeds.

That's the power of brand-building that speaks The 5 Love Languages to show consumers empathy and generosity. At PDA, our approach to reaching mass audiences and niche communities is simple and effective: understand what people love, and just give it to them.