Creative Strategy - Digging for creative gold.

“Gather your facts and get under the skin of your target. Talk to them in their language.” Barbara Noakes – Copywriter (DDB, BBH, CME.KHBB, Grey)

There are two types of well-known campaigns: ones that are wildly popular and ones that are wildly successful. Very rarely does a campaign achieve both. Barbara Noakes created more than a few that ticked both boxes. The campaign she co-created for Levi’s 501 jeans titled “Launderette” that launched on Boxing Day 1985 in the UK, produced so much demand for the jeans that the campaign was taken off air to allow retailers to restock. In fact, sales grew 800% and they were eventually selling 20 times what they had previously. The Marvin Gaye track “Heard it Through the Grapevine” that was used in the ad reentered the top 10 in the charts, the model featured became a (short lived) celebrity and had a song written for him by Madonna. That is successful.

What interests me in this story is not the direction, casting, or the music (which were all excellent) but the insight on which the campaign was based. That insight was in research provided by Levi’s that indicated the intended audience of 15–19-year-old males thought that the USA in the fifties and sixties was cool. An idea that could tap into that era, with a bit of James Dean swagger, may resonate with the audience and help Levi’s move their perception among that audience from being ‘dad jeans’ to teenage must-haves.

This is creative strategy 101. Insights that create a space where ideas can be formed that will be effective. This is the heart of what I do on a daily basis at Yakkazoo.

I started my career at McCann Erikson in 1984 and clearly remember the Levi’s advert. Over the years I have seen thousands of TV commercials; many forgettable, some memorable in content but not brand, and occasionally ones that did both. In those years, as I moved into creative, I relied more and more on strategy, research, insights and evidence because I learned from countless encounters with skeptical clients, that ideas based on an insight could be approved if they agreed with the insights that we had found.

Ideas are never formed in isolation. The perception of writers and art directors sitting in a dark room throwing random ideas around until something sticks, is far from the truth. Behind great campaigns are reams of data, research panels, media monitoring, careful planning and ‘just-right’ execution that will give creatives the space to do their magic. The insights are such that you can guess campaigns based on the insight that they were based on. Try these:

• Computer technology is being controlled by a few big (boring) companies
• Achieving personal fitness and sporting goals is hard, but worthwhile
• Public safety messages are boring and people hate being nagged

If you didn’t pick them, the campaigns are Apple “Big Brother”, Nike “Just Do It” and Metro Trains “Dumb Ways to Die”. Each was wildly successful, memorable and based on simple insights.

With the splintering of media over recent decades we now have an enormous number of channels to communicate through, and the TV advert as the core tactic for campaigns has largely diminished. However, creative strategy remains as crucial as ever.

“Dumb Ways to Die” is a great example. The campaign was launched on billboards, newspapers and radio but the primary channel was YouTube, where it has been viewed over 200 million times and within two weeks had generated over $50m in global media value. It also worked – reducing near-miss incidents on the train network by over 30% in the first year. It also won the Integrated Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and overall, won five Grand Prix awards, 18 Gold Lions, three Silver Lions, and two Bronze Lions.

The insights that we require do not always come nicely packaged in the client’s brief. Often, we need to seek our own insights, do the research, and question both the client and the intended audience deeply to find the nuggets that we can leverage.

Some insights come from unexpected sources. Barbara Noakes, while working on the Audi account, combined research that indicated UK car buyers perceived Audi as being European but not specifically German, with words she saw above a door in an Audi factory in Germany that read “Vorsprung durch Technik” (advancement/forward through technology). This became the tagline for Audi that has been used pretty much continuously since, and positioned Audi alongside BMW, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz as a top-level, German, automotive manufacturer. 

Giving your agency the time to do the strategy work, allowing the team the scope to seek out the insights, will almost always return dividends in more effective creative. I like the analogy of mining, of digging through the strata looking for the seams of ore that can be brought up, separated and refined into beautiful, valuable, creative gold. The trick is you have to do the hard, dirty, work first.

 Credit to @unclebernbach for his fantastic Twitter threads about legendary advertising campaigns and creatives. Image from Levi's commercial copyright Levi's Strauss and Company.