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Creative Brandcasting

The creative and production issues arising from the convergence of advertising and content.

Branded Media: Creative and Production

NMK seminar report from November 2001

Speakers:

• Chairperson: Ross Sleight, HHCL Group
• Kevin Moss, Creative Director, Incline Media
• Helen Weddell, Creative Director, Grey Interactive
• David Hurren, Executive Creative Director, OgilvyInteractive

Kevin Moss, Creative Director at Incline Media , began by addressing the creative challenges of transforming TV, radio or print advertising into genuinely entertaining online content, while remaining true to the brief and brand values embodied in the offline campaign. The key is to identify an idea behind the brief that can be developed into more creative and innovative forms of advertising.

Another important consideration is to develop content that is appropriate to the medium you’re working in. One account that Kevin worked on at Incline was Breathe.com, whose lavish and beautifully filmed TV and cinema ads had already been released. While it would have been tempting to use the TV ads as the basis for the online campaign, Kevin and his team realised that to do so would not have done justice either to the original ads or to the medium in which the team was working.

Instead, they came up with a series of six interactive modules based around variations on the theme ‘it’s amazing what happens when you breathe’. Aimed at a target audience of FHM readers, the modules included such delights as a game in which users could inflate a blow-up doll by breathing into a microphone attached to the computer. The aim was to create modules of entertaining content that users would forward to their friends and colleagues, each with its own look and feel, but all subtly embedded with the Breathe.com brand.

In another project, Kevin’s team was commissioned to build a site for financial advisers from Scottish Provident. Following a profiling exercise, which revealed their audience to be competitive, keen on sport, and short of time, they designed a golf game enabling advisers to compete against their colleagues one hole at a time. Again, the game used entertaining content to build a positive brand image among the target audience; it successfully doubled registered users on the site within the first month.

To conclude, Kevin gave the following recommendations:

• Keep it simple, intuitive and accessible
• If appropriate, capture the essence of the offline campaign, but don’t translate it directly
• You don’t have to shoehorn a brand into a game — the possibilities are endless
• Return on investment for clients and users should remain you main priority

Helen Weddell, Creative Director, Grey Interactive

A couple of years ago, the biggest challenge facing agencies was how to make a campaign interactive. Now, the challenge is how to promote a brand across many platforms, integrating web, interactive TV, wireless, direct marketing and above-the-line campaigns. Helen Weddell, Creative Director at Grey Interactive, believes that this fragmentation of focus and proliferation of new technologies has encouraged creatives from different disciplines to work together increasingly closely, and that this in turn has been one of the main drivers behind the increasing convergence of content and advertising.

As Helen demonstrated with the case studies she described, such projects can differ widely in character, but to ensure success she recommends observing the following guiding principles:

1. Successful creative content is derived from an understanding of the consumer, the brand, and the relationship between the two. Therefore:
   • Talk to the consumers first, and don’t make assumptions
   • Get to the root of the brand — what is the compelling benefit?
2. Harness the potential of the medium to provide unique opportunities for the consumer
3. Keep it simple: set-up a clear role for the communication, and keep everything relevant to this
4. Consumers should experience the brand — not just see it
5. Consumers should have a strong incentive to interact, participate, and become involved with the brand, and respond to the campaign, on an emotional or rational level
6. Provide synergy and integration across all channels

These qualities were evident in Helen’s first example, a pan-European mobile phone project for The Cartoon Network. Working in what was, at the time, a new medium, the company’s approach was to bring two teams together to brainstorm the idea – one with above-the-line experience, and one with interactive expertise. Neither group knew very much about the technical issues involved, preferring to come up with a core concept before working out how to bring popular Cartoon Network characters such as Scooby Doo to life in a technically restricting environment. The branded mobile games and applications they came up with proved compelling enough to attract 3000 registered users within one month, although the service had no PR campaign.

Helen’s second example was a project to develop an online banking service for Lloyds TSB on Telewest’s digital TV platform. In this case the challenge was to combine the emotional qualities of the conventional TV experience with the functional requirements of managing a bank account, and the approach was to split into two teams, one to study the project from a usability and technical perspective, the other to develop the brand concept. The teams then worked together to produce the final product, a customer-centred service that brought banking into the home.

In both examples, the teams involved took a similarly methodical approach to developing the concept for the campaign. Helen outlined this as follows:

1. Understand the brand promise to the consumer (e.g. ‘it makes me feel like a star’)
2. Ask how brand promise fits into consumer’s life. How can you make the customer feel as though they own the brand experience?
3. Make the idea inherently interactive (not because the technology makes it possible, but because it’s appropriate)
4. Ensure the idea has longevity and a life of its own
5. Only once strong collaterel has been created should you bring the product itself into the equation

The two examples also illustrate the need for creative practitioners from different disciplines to work together, and for this reason it is a good idea for parties from all fields to be present during the initial stages of campaign planning meetings. As Helen put it, if we all work together it could get complicated, but it might just work.

David Hurren, Executive Creative Director, OgilvyInteractive

Like the first two speakers, David Hurren from OgilvyInteractive showcased a branded game his company had developed for a client - which suggests that gaming is the popular choice when it comes to turning advertising into compelling content for interactive environments. His demonstration centred on work that the agency carried out for IBM’s ‘Solutions for the City’ campaign, aimed at IT procurement staff in the financial sector, and designed to take a rather mundane subject and turn it into entertaining content.

As part of the multi-channel campaign, David’s team developed the ‘Tek Trek’ platform game, in which players had to make their way from Liverpool Street station to the London Eye while avoiding angry commuters and other obstacles. In common with the other speakers, David did not seem particularly adept at playing the game itself, but the campaign proved popular with its target market, spreading virally, and resulting in fierce competition to achieve the highest scores (which were posted online).

When asked whether traditional media might be threatened by the prospect of brands starting to create their own engaging content, David suggested that the trend presents us with opportunities to create entirely new media spaces, and to question our narrow definitions of what constitutes a media company. He also anticipated that advertisers will work increasingly closely with production companies, since developing campaigns for interactive media is a far more complicated process than that for traditional, linear media, where production work is often completely outsourced by agencies.

As branded content becomes more common, we will develop a more sophisticated appreciation of the relationship between the appeal of the media space and the attraction of the content itself. Agencies will get better at recognising the hooks that get people interested, and content optimisation will improve.