Please make yourself uncomfortable

Let’s admit it: we can certainly say these days most of the advertising industry is obsessed with pushing ‘content’ and distributing stuff, measuring and tracking ‘cold’ responses all the time: reach, impressions, taps, clicks, forms, leads… Always relying on making the most of their media budget to make that happen, replicating the layout and headline in too many executions, obsessed with consistency with CI’s and taglines only a few stakeholders from the companies will care about but no one in real life will remember.

As soon as everything can fit nicely in spreadsheets and slides with graphics, everyone can tap themselves on their favourite shoulder and leave the office in peace at 5pm: the product/brand has been shown many times, the offer has been told through many different touchpoints and who cares if there’s someone out there genuinely reacting in a positive way about the messages and experiences delivered to the audiences.

According to a study from 2017 in the UK (the 4th largest ad market in the world, according to Statista), with 21.1bn Euros spent each year on all forms of advertising, an impressive 89% of all of it was not remembered at all. That’s the scary output of doing things by the book, not taking any risks and consistently avoiding innovation and creativity, as a consequence of being a solid market, stable and predictable. But quite forgettable and skippable, apparently. Market size: Goliath. Market impact: David.

So I always wonder: what if those massive media budgets we have in front of us are not that big, or there’s not a media budget at all? What if the rules changed? What if the market is so volatile we almost cannot project the campaign in the future, but we still need to deliver?

When ticking the very basic boxes of Marketing has been doing the job for many years and keeping stakeholders more o less happy, there are big chances that we will be dealing with people so comfortable in their seats and positions, they don’t have the pressure to innovate or to be truly creative.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about today if you let me. Are we keen on fully embracing being creative and innovative? Or we are super confident that playing it safe is good enough? The truth is, there’s not such a thing as “playing safe”. Safe according to what? To some sort of biased online panel? The gut feeling of 5 people in a meeting room? Or maybe those same 5 people in a meeting room who had been overthinking it until making the idea or campaign “just OK” and understandable instead of likeable or lovable? Safe is a comfortable word to avoid going into a long run that will require not only talent but persistence too.

In a series of experiments run back in 2015 by Brian J. Lucas and Loran Nordgren -researchers from Harvard University- it was found that we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence. We tend to do this because creative challenges feel difficult. People often have the experience of feeling “stuck,” being unsure of how to find a solution, or hitting a wall with one idea and having to start over again. Their work showed that when creative challenges start to feel difficult, most people lower their expectations about the performance benefits of perseverance, and consequently, underestimate their own ability to generate ideas.

Unpredictable market conditions, unstable economic environment, a devalued currency, and increasing inflation. What could sound like a nightmare for a lot of marketers and creatives, is the day to day to another bunch of marketers and creatives. That’s where persistence and resilience translate into innovative and bold ideas that truly stand out, regardless of the media or production budgets. In environments like this, brands with very limited or no advertising budgets need to be creative to survive. Their livelihood depends on looking for innovative ways to get people talking.

To illustrate this, I would like to share two examples from just a few weeks ago, from a market far far away. The products, as almost all the products in the world, competing in categories where commoditization put all the brands at the same level: a soft drink, and condoms. If we really believe there’s anything new to say about products like that, we’re doomed. But what brands behind those products decided to do, is to connect with people on a less egotistic level, through bold creativity and true innovation that let their message to be part of the conversations that make the fabric of society: pop culture.

On one side we have Sprite. They have been neutralizing hate with love in its global campaign, which kicked off with a spot depicting various victims of online bullying responding to their harasses with a simple message: “I love you”. A couple of weeks ago, they decided to turn the camera toward the bully himself, in a bold stunt where they put an unsuspecting online troll face to face with 100 of his victims. To achieve this, over two months Sprite and their agencies developed an AI tool that could analyse the themes and subjects of Twitter conversations to distinguish between aggressive and non-aggressive messages. They then used data mining technology to find out who aggressors were within the Sprite community. Among these, they were able to identify one user as the most aggressive - he had attacked 565 people in more than 1,000 tweets during the past year. You can see the work here:

A couple of days after being lunched down there in a small market like Argentina, this campaign was celebrated by Sarah Silverman (American stand-up comedian, actress, producer, and writer) when she publicly endorsed it in a post to her 12.6 million followers on Twitter. Media budget for that? Zero. Influencer marketing strategy involved? None. Creativity? A lot of it, and the good one.

On the other hand, we have Tulipan (Tulip), a condom brand that released a package that emphasises consent by requiring four hands to open it, the product of working together with their agency. In Latin America, and in this case in Argentina, consent sex is a big deal. So in order to address this with a solution — instead of just dropping some smart messages in the shape of “social media content”, they developed a pack the pack featuring a system that requires four hands -or two people- to agree to open it, by clicking four buttons on the top and sides of the box at the same time. This innovation comes after a survey of 30,000 people conducted by AHF Argentina, which campaigns for HIV treatment and services, revealed that 20.5% of Argentine men never use protection, 65% occasionally use condoms and only 14.5% regularly use them. Here’s the idea for you to see:

The campaign has been covered not only by media in the local market, but media outlets from all over the world like Mashable, CNN, Rolling Stone and even Trevor Noah (host of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central) have been commenting it, sometimes celebrating it, some other times criticizing it. But always taking the buzz and the reactions way beyond the tiny constraints of media and production budgets of an underdeveloped market. 100% innovation: applying creativity to generate a unique solution.

What did these two ideas have in common? Well, this time we could invert the equation… Market size: David. Market impact: Goliath. Both connected with issues and topics that are truly relevant for people, and they just did something that translated their point of view into different experiences and messages. The most important thing is they did it. They didn’t let those ideas die in a Keynote deck, where most of the “unsafe” or risky ideas end up when there’s no real need to stand out from the crowd. But hey, those other "just OK" campaigns that belong to that 89% we mentioned before, they are still safe and they will never be commented by anyone. What a waste of time, talent, money and resources, isn't it?

Let’s remember that creative problems are supposed to feel difficult. Most involve setbacks, failures, and that “stuck” feeling. It’s part of the process. Let’s suppress our instinct to interpret these feelings as a signal that we just aren’t creative or that we’ve run out of good ideas.

Quoting legendary Creative Director and author Dave Trott: “We’re in creativity. We’re in the game of out-thinking other people. Or we’re in the 89% that doesn’t work”. Let’s push ourselves. Let's stay eager to learn, take risks, and keep trying to do what others say can’t be done.