Start with What People are Already Talking About

Brands love to talk about themselves. They want to tell everybody about their cool new features or why they're better than their competitors. You can't blame them, but the fact is, most people don't give a fig. In fact, a recent study by Havas Media Labs concluded the public wouldn't care if most brands just up and disappeared.¹

This suggests that perhaps the prudent approach is to talk less about brands and more about what people are currently interested in. The latest public conversations are easy enough to find. Google trends tell us precisely what everyone's searching for. Twitter's trending topics also highlight the most popular conversations of the moment. Even Instagram lets us track the hottest trends, fashions, and music. In an age when we can eavesdrop on all the conversations happening on Facebook, Tumblr, Vine, and other new media, is it really a good idea to crash this party and start talking about Hot Pockets or six-piece dinnerware sets? Probably not. Especially when we can join the party by adding something that contributes to the conversation. The lesson here for brands is to connect what they're good at with what's relevant to each community.

One quick example is Oreo's famous “You can still dunk in the dark” ad. Oreo didn't come in the door trying to sell a cookie. They simply tapped into the topic dominating Super Bowl XLVII—when the lights went out—and tied their product to the conversation.

While we're on the Super Bowl, here's another example. Knowing this massive media event is the one time of year everyone's watching and talking about commercials, Droga5 gently injected its client Newcastle Brown Ale into the conversation, and not with a commercial. They created a campaign about not being able to afford a Super Bowl spot.

They hired actress Anna Kendrick to star in what she thought would be an ad on the “Mega-Game” only to reveal there was never any money to run a commercial. Newcastle couldn't even afford to use the words “Super Bowl.” Instead the agency built a “mega huge website for the mega huge football game commercial” its client couldn't afford (Figure 12.2). Droga5 activated the whole thing using social media and hit the jackpot. Over 600 media outlets covered the campaign. Late-night talk shows made it a topic. It was the #1 trending topic on Twitter for two days and earned media impressions exceeded a billion. Virtually every list of the Top 10 Super Bowl ads included Newcastle, even though it never aired on the Super Bowl.

It was a dead-on strategy for the brand. Newcastle's creative platform, which remains consistent across multiple campaigns, is “no bollocks.” What made this particular campaign work is how it was less about beer and more about what people were already talking about—the big game and the annual over-the-top ad blitz. whipple5mega

Conversations that reveal people's interests are going on all the time, and many are about your clients, their products, or their industry. You can find them on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and pretty much every other social platform. You'll want to get in the habit of checking for them regularly, even daily. Learn to use all the social channels as search engines. It's a simple tactic that can be incredibly helpful in jump-starting your next creative assignment.

Strategist Gareth Kay shared this in a “Think with Google” interview: “Be interested in what people are interested in. Compete for their attention on their terms, not yours.”

Join an Ongoing Conversation or Jump-Start a New One

Today a brand can join any conversation, even one where just one person is talking. A great example comes from Razorfish and their client Smart Car. Being the smallest car out there often attracts jibes on social media such as this tweet last year: “Saw a bird crapped on a Smart Car. Totaled it.”

The Smart Car team at Razorfish, wisely tracking all mentions of their client on social media, saw the clever comment less as a knock on the brand and more as an opportunity to generate some buzz. With tongue in cheek, Razorfish wondered aloud if one bird poop could in fact total a Smart Car. They did a little research into how much poop a pigeon poops and then calculated that totaling a Smart Car would require 4.5 million pigeons to do their business at the same time (Figure 12.3). They made similar calculations for turkeys and emus and turned it all into a clever infographic that they had online by the end of the same day. whipple5poop

It wasn't a big idea by any means. But that's probably why it earned so much attention from the media and Twitter users alike. It also increased Google searches for Smart Car's “tridion safety cell” by 330 percent.

Invite People to Come Play

In the next 60 seconds users will upload more than 300 hours of new video to YouTube.² In the next 24 hours, they'll post more than 70 million images on Instagram and generate a half a billion tweets.³ It appears that everybody and their brother is busy generating content. Some are even pretty good at it. Given that all this is already happening, why not take advantage of the public's urge to create?

Many smart advertisers and agencies have put their egos aside and made peace with the fact they're not the only ones who can produce good content. They've begun to create campaigns that invite users to produce content for them.

The agencies that really get it know that leveraging ongoing conversations takes more than just posting a question on Facebook or a hashtag on Twitter. It's not guaranteed the public will chime in. You still have to have a concept: an idea that's not only interesting enough to attract participation but also capable enough of inspiring the kind of content others will want to engage with and share.

One of the earliest examples of a brand getting people to post content on their behalf was the Ford Fiesta Movement. To introduce their new car in the United States, Ford eschewed traditional advertising and launched a grassroots social media campaign. The automaker gave 100 Fiestas to social-media-savvy millennials to use for six months, in return for posting content about their experiences on their Twitter feeds, YouTube channels, and blogs. The campaign was incredibly successful, but it also took a lot of work to find the right content-generating participants. The agency had to hold online casting calls, and candidates had to prove their social prowess, submitting for review their videos, social content, and Twitter feeds.

Ford chose a finite group of participants while Nike, another great digital marketer, took a different approach. As part its sponsorship of the Tour de France, Nike and their ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, built what could be called the first entrant in the Internet of Things—the Nike Chalkbot (Figure 12.4). whipple5chalkbot

From any laptop, W+K invited people to post words of encouragement for loved ones battling cancer. Nike's Internet-connected Chalkbot then dutifully spray-painted each message of hope directly onto the roads of the tour, snapped a picture, and e-mailed a JPG back to the sender—a picture almost everyone eagerly shared across their own social networks.

Nobody was the least bit surprised when W+K and their tech partner Deep Local won the top prize at Cannes that year:

Everyone who saw the messages, [said W+K art director, Adam Heathcott] whether on TV, Twitter, or in France, became a participant. People could read each of the individual messages and take in their strength, wit, and clarity, or take a step back and see what everyone had become a part of: an enormous physical representation that we aren't alone in this fight against cancer. Through the Chalkbot, we created a physical forum for the Livestrong community to spread their own message in their own words, far better than we could have written on our own.⁴

Connect People to One Another

“We greatly overvalue connecting people to brands and information, and undervalue connecting people to each other,” wrote Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus. Shirkey's observation seems dead-on, considering we constantly go online seeking help and advice from our social tribes. We scour Pinterest for decorating suggestions. We get tips from friends on Facebook. We even rely on strangers' reviews to make many of our purchase decisions. It would seem any marketer who knows what they're doing on social media could contribute to, and benefit from, our desire to connect with one another.

One of the better examples of the power of connection is “Skype in the Classroom,” a program conceived by Made by Many. The company, which calls itself an innovation accelerator (not an ad agency), was charged with getting more teachers to use Skype. To reach educators, the knee-jerk reaction at an old-fashioned ad agency might be, “Hey, let's run an ad in an obscure educational journal.” But not at Made by Many. After discovering the problem wasn't awareness or how to use the service, but finding the right people to Skype with, Made by Many created a digital platform that let teachers discover willing experts in the topics they were teaching and vice versa. While Skype in the Classroom continues to evolve, it was initially a two-sided directory, connecting speakers with something to share and teachers who needed their expertise.

The much-talked-about Nike+ connected people. On the surface, Nike+ was an activity tracker that measured and recorded a runner's pace and distance. But the big idea underneath it was this: Nike+ made running social. It connected athletes to friends and competitors so they could cheer each other on, challenge one another, or compare accomplishments.

On a smaller, more experimental scale, Coca-Cola has been connecting its customers to each other with many different digital ideas, the Re: Brief initiative discussed earlier being one example. The beverage giant has played with other ways to use its brand and its vending machines to unite people.

Several years ago, Coke sent out an open brief to all its global agencies. The assignment: “Create a moment of happiness.” The winning concept from Leo Burnett Sydney, “Small World Machines,” turned Coke's big red vending units into video communication portals that connected citizens from India and Pakistan (Figure 12.5). One thing they had in common, of course, was a taste for Coca-Cola. Coke set up vending machines in each country, connected them over the Internet, and then invited people on different sides of the border to perform silly and fun collaborative tasks using cameras and screens embedded in the machines. Participants were rewarded with, of course, free drinks. whipple5smallworld

Make Things That are Useful

We're happy to single out Charmin again, but this time for doing something useful.

In 2008, Charmin began sponsoring “SitOrSquat,” an existing service designed to help travelers with an infant or a toddler, or anyone for that matter, who needs to find a restroom quickly (Figure 12.6). The app, created by developer Densebrain, worked by collecting geotagged user-generated suggestions to create a fairly reliable database of accessible, clean restrooms. (Apparently, the Tim Hortons on McNab Street in Ontario is okay.)

What makes this app relevant to our conversation about digital, of course, is that it's everything traditional advertising isn't. It's not a message; it's a utility. The content isn't created by an ad agency; it's user-generated. More important, it's an idea that came from a brand wondering what it could do to help improve customers' lives.

Utility can be as simple as sharing useful content, as Lowe's does when it posts decorating tips on Pinterest. It can be a single event as when Burberry live-streams its fashion shows. Or it can be a more permanent fixture, such as LensCrafters' in-store displays, which show you a life-size image of your face on a screen as you digitally try on different frames to see how they look.

Utility can even inspire users to stay healthy, as Nike showed with Your Year (Figure 12.7). The program takes your workout data for the previous year, combines it with Google maps and weather data, and turns it into a personalized one-minute film designed by French illustrator McBess. While being very branded and very Nike, it isn't a message; it's something customers can use—a digital yardstick for athletic achievement to encourage greater accomplishments in the next year.

Sherwin-Williams has several digital tools to help you capture colors and convert them into Sherwin-Williams colors—quite useful if you're thinking about painting. One such service is their “Chip It” button, created by McKinney Durham. Simply drag the icon to your bookmarks bar and then next time you see a color you like, click on the picture, and instantly you have the Sherwin-Williams paint numbers for the entire palette of colors in the image. Again, this may not be an ad per se, but it does what all good advertising should do. It makes people like the brand.

Design Your Ideas to Migrate

Consider the poor print ad, confined as it is to a single page in a single issue; to be seen only if someone flips open the magazine, turns to just the right page, and stops for a moment. There's no like button. No link to tweet or share. No embed code to allow a reader to republish it.

But unlike their predecessors, digital ads and content—videos, GIFs, and even tweets—are free to travel from medium to medium. Of course they don't go anywhere by themselves. Digital ideas need distribution plans. That means we have to know how to create shareable content and seed it across social media via fans, followers, and other interested parties.

Here's a perfect example. Plan of Norway, an international aid organization focused on girls' rights, wanted to raise awareness for the issue of forced marriages and child brides. It's estimated that 39,000 children are made to marry every year in places like Niger and Bangladesh. What Plan did was extraordinary.

They recruited a 12-year-old girl to start what appeared to be a real blog about her impending marriage to a 37-year-old man. No logo, no organization identification, no ad buy, no press release. Just a blog (Figure 12.8). But by seeding that blog on Twitter and spreading the idea on social media, Plan made it visible. They organically attracted a community of outraged social media users who themselves started a movement to #stopthewedding. That, in turn, led to press coverage and actual demonstrations condemning the marriage. Only then did Plan reveal that young Thea's blog was a campaign intended to bring this issue to the world's attention. All the organization did was start a blog, but the team behind the idea knew how to use the Web to generate enough interest so that others would take the cause to Twitter, turn it into a hashtag, spark the attention of the media, and make it an international story.

whipple5stopthewedding

We often think too much about the making and not the spreading. But we'd be wise to heed the advice of Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed, who suggests that anyone creating content these days should spend 50 percent of their creative energies on the idea and 50 percent on its distribution.

Embrace the Warp Speed of the Internet

“No one needs six months to do stuff anymore,” says Megan Sheehan, the creative director behind Oreo's Daily Twist (Figure 12.9), a campaign that produced 100 ads in 100 days to celebrate the cookie's 100th anniversary.

The agency knew it was a gamble when it proposed the idea to its client. Hoping to take a beloved brand and elevate its cultural relevance by making it part of the online conversation, Sheehan and her team had their work cut out for them. They would have to identify new topics every day, generate concepts in close to real time, and then get the work through layers of approval, including legal. Fortunately, the client, Cindy Chen, had already stated outright she wanted to win a Lion at Cannes and make the brand famous. (Oh, to have clients like Ms. Chen.)

When the first ad, a rainbow-filled Oreo celebrating Gay Pride month, went viral on day one, Sheehan knew they were doing something right.

You can look at all 100 Daily Twist ads⁵ and they may appear to be just that: ads. In fact, they don't look all that different in terms of layout than, say, the Volkswagen ads from the 1960s. The difference, of course, is they were conceived, produced, and put out into the world in a fraction of the time that “doing ads” typically requires. Note also how they never started their message with some product benefit but instead rode the wake of what people were talking about already.

Tim Cawley, the award-winning writer and creative, also espouses the fast and cheap approach. While writing and directing a documentary, From Nothing Something, he realized it didn't take nearly the time or money most agencies would've required to produce a similar piece. Cawley took that model to Mullen/Lowe where he created multiple campaigns virtually overnight for the agency's real estate client Century 21. It didn't take long for him to realize that more and more clients wanted good content produced fast without a lot of money. So he opened an agency to do just that and today, Sleek Machine's mantra is tailor-made for the digital age: “Ideas That Matter at Internet speed.”

“The Web operates at warp speed,” says Cawley. “You don't have to fly to L.A., stay at Shutters, and expense sushi dinners to do good work.”

Being creative in real time calls for changes in both mindset and process. Instead of the strategy dictating the content, sometimes the content dictates the strategy. A relevant opportunity, such as the lights going out in the middle of the Super Bowl, or a popular television series coming to an end, presents itself and smart, attentive creative teams and their clients take action.

Do > Invite > Document > Share

Or, How to Create Social, Shareable Ideas for the Digital World

If there's one significant difference between the analog way of advertising and the digital way of advertising, it's this: We used to say things and talk about our client's products. Today we're better off if we do things that get other people to talk about our client's products. To begin with, if we do something interesting or useful, rather than simply craft a message, we're more likely to earn attention. Additionally, if we give people a chance to contribute or just share, we generate more content; content that's shared between friends, not broadcast from brands.

Here's the formula I see work effectively over and over again: Do > Invite > Document > Share.

1. Do something interesting, but on strategy, of course.
2. Conceive the idea so that it allows people to participate, and find a way to invite them to join in.
3. Document the event so it lives beyond the event and becomes content.
4. Make it shareable across every relevant channel.

How IBM used it: At SXSW last year, IBM executed Do > Invite > Document > Share to perfection. Eager to showcase the creativity of Watson, their big-brained computer, IBM put the machine to work inventing new recipes never before imagined. Then they built and designed a food truck—perfect for Austin, where mobile meals rule the midday eating routine—and staffed it with a team of chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education. But before deciding what to serve each day, IBM crowd-sourced the ingredients via Twitter and the hashtag #IBMFoodTruck. SXSW's hungry throngs suggested a main ingredient. IBM's lunch truck chefs combined the most popular ingredient with a randomly selected region from somewhere across the globe. Then Watson tapped into its vast database of knowledge regarding ingredients, chemistry, calories, texture, and flavors to invent a totally original recipe.

IBM prepared the meal, gave convention goers free samples, photographed and videotaped the weeklong daily ritual, and encouraged users to share the experience with their social network and the crowds of SXSW. It goes without saying that tweets, Instagrams, blog posts, and news coverage touting the power of Watson quickly followed.

How Zappos used it: Zappos turned an airport luggage carousel into a roulette game. Lucky travelers, typically thrilled just to have their suitcase show up, found their bag sitting on a square that won them one of many prizes. What did they do? They tweeted about it, snapped images for Instagram, and shared it on Facebook. And before you know it, “Wheel of Fortune” Zappos-style was lighting up the Web.

In an age when everyone walks around carrying a camera, Internet access, and a willingness to snap, post, and share, you definitely want to put their digital energy to work by doing something, inviting participation, documenting it, and sharing the outcome.

How Prudential used it: You're probably not thinking much about saving for retirement. But it turns out even people in their 50s and 60s also avoid thinking about the subject. It's too easy a thing to put off. But if Prudential, which is in the business of selling insurance and retirement plans, is to stay among the leaders in its business, it needs people buying retirement plans and investing in its products. Back in the day, this meant running an ad in Money magazine that had a picture of silver-haired grandparents enjoying an idyllic retirement on the coast of Maine where they bounced grandchildren on their knees whenever they weren't walking hand in hand along the shore.

Prudential, once a member of the stock-photo-of-fake-grandparents club, now takes a different approach. Working with its agency Droga5, the company recently built “The Challenge Lab.” And it is so not a website selling insurance stuff. Rather it's an interesting set of tools, quizzes, calculators, and challenges that helps users actually understand why they're reluctant to make a plan, why they're putting off saving for the future, and then helps them actually make a plan. whipple5pru

Even when Droga5 did advertise the Challenge Lab, they took a “do something” approach to creating the work. The agency built a 1,100-square-foot wall and invited hundreds of people in Austin to paste a large blue dot over the age of the oldest person they knew (Figure 12.10). When the wall was filled in, it displayed a huge infographic revealing the gap between the standard retirement age and the age that more and more people are living to. The takeaway for anyone who looked at it was, “Uh oh, I retire at 65 but may well live to be 100.” The agency and client filmed the event, interviewed participants, shared the content and the experience online and on social platforms, and at the end turned it into a TV commercial.

Now you use it: As you look at some of the other examples in these pages and at work running right now in the marketplace, see if you can reverse engineer your way back to this model: Do > Invite > Document > Share. We'll talk more about “dissecting” work like this in Chapter 15.

1. Instead of saying something, do something.
2. Instead of controlling the content, invite people to create it with you.
3. Instead of producing some message-based interruption, document the participation and the creation of the content.
4. Instead of relying exclusively on paid media, share the story via owned and earned media.

Do > Invite > Document > Share. Try it for your next project.

Start with More Interesting Questions: Try “How Might We…?”

In the days when we were making ads confined to one medium—print, radio, outdoor, TV—the question we had to answer was: “How do we say (FILL IN THE BLANK) in a clever and creative enough way to be noticed and remembered?” But today, an ad isn't necessarily the solution to every marketing problem.

And as we've discussed, since we can no longer count on buying attention, we need to ask different questions. We're likely better off solving problems with new forms of content, digital experiences, or by creating useful things. I suggest stealing the approach IDEO uses and made famous (which is okay since they stole it from someone else). The design thinking company, known for inventing the original Apple mouse, begins all of its projects with the question, “How might we?”⁶

We first learned of the HMW question from Charles Warren, then Google's UX lead for social products. At a gathering of digital creative chiefs at Google's New York offices, Warren told the story of Procter & Gamble's determination to compete with the popular soap Irish Spring from its rival competitor Colgate Palmolive.

The standard approach in those days (not unlike what we sometimes do in advertising) was to develop a similar product—another green-and-white-striped soap—and give it a different name. But a new member of the marketing team named Min Basadur, author of The Power of Innovation quoted above, asked P&G why they were working on creating another soap with two green stripes. Unsatisfied with an answer about beating Irish Spring at the green game, Basadur got P&G to think about asking better questions and taught them a process of innovating that begins with “how might we?”

That led to a series of how-might-we questions. How might we grow P&G revenues? How might we make a better soap? How might we make a soap that's more refreshing? The latter was something the team could actually do, and so the process continued. How might we make a more refreshing soap? With a menthol sensation? The scent of gin and tonic? The imagery and color of the beach? The beach won out and the marketing giant introduced Coast, a worthy and successful competitor to Irish Spring.

Over time, “how might we” found its way to Google, Facebook, and other innovative companies. On his blog, IDEO's CEO Tim Brown explains why the question is so effective:

1. “How” assumes solutions exist and provides the creative confidence needed to identify and solve for unmet needs.
2. “Might” gives us permission to put ideas out there that might work or might not—either way, we'll learn something useful.
3. “We” signals that we're going to collaborate and build on each other's ideas to find creative solutions together.

There are important distinctions between “what should we say?” and “how might we?” What suggests that there is a question but presumes that a correct answer lies at the end of the process. Say, of course, leads us to a message.

But “how might we” guides us somewhere else. How might we get more people to visit Sweden? How might we convey all the different qualities of the country? How might we find a range of good stories to tell? How might we get citizens to play a role? You get the idea. The Swedish Institute may or may not have gotten to their Twitter idea by asking “how might we?” But rather than copy that idea to market a destination, perhaps you'd be better off asking questions this way.

Add this question to the questions we already talked about in the new brief and see where it gets you. We guess you'll end up someplace far more interesting than a traditional ad.

While we're on the subject of questions, you may also want to take a gander at another wonderful book: A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger. We recommend it. Berger takes you through multiple journeys that cover how asking the right questions can lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions.

“Instead of Coming Up with Advertising Ideas, Come Up with Ideas Worth Advertising”

That brilliant quotation is from Gareth Kay, former chief strategy officer at GS&P and the founder of Chapter SF, another one of the new-breed creative companies; the ones that take on business problems that can't always be solved with an ad. Copy this quotation and pin it on your wall or on your laptop screen.

Put another way, a brand isn't what it says. A brand is what it does, even in its advertising. If you look at some of the more innovative digital and social advertising ideas of the last few years, you can see that's exactly how smarter brands and their agencies are marketing. They're taking action that actually benefits customers and users while at the same time demonstrating what the company is all about. Doing is better than saying.

American Express invents a special day: When American Express wanted small businesses across America to know that the credit card company had their backs and believed in their value to Main Street America, AMEX didn't run some ad campaign telling them so. The financial services company started a movement that would actually help small businesses solve the problem they needed help with more than any other: attracting new customers. AmEx and agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky came up with “Small Business Saturday,” a special shopping day for the day after Black Friday. If Black Friday drove shoppers to megamalls and department stores, Small Business Saturday reminded them to patronize their local mom-and-pop stores right down the street.

“The biggest ideas are generally those that are programs or initiatives which demonstrate something. Something that by its nature conveys the idea within it,” explained Mark Taylor, CP+B's group creative director on the project.⁷

Small Business Saturday was far more than an advertising campaign. It was a cultural event. Instead of talking at small business, American Express did something for small business. It implored people to support their downtown merchants. And no doubt, it convinced thousands of small businesses, often reluctant to accept the card that charged them a higher fee than MasterCard or Visa, to embrace and accept AmEx's card.

It was only after the launch of the program that a full-blown advertising campaign was rolled out, with everything from window stickers to TV commercials. Amex even got President Obama to tweet his support. But before they produced any advertising ideas, they did what Gareth Kay was talking about: They came up with an idea worth advertising.

Harvey Nichols advertises worthless Christmas gifts: What you do doesn't have to be digital if it gets digital. A marvelous example came from leading luxury fashion retailer Harvey Nichols. The high-end British retailer known for its must-have luxury products ran a brilliant Christmas campaign titled “Sorry, I Spent It on Myself,” created by adam&eve DDB (Figure 12.11).

The store introduced its Sorry, I Spent It on Myself Gift Collection—a range of Harvey Nichols–branded sink plugs, paper clips, toothpicks, and other worthless items customers could give as “gifts” (which then let them spend more on themselves). The products were, of course, a stunt. But they actually sold out, generated huge online buzz, and lent themselves to some great advertising.

But it was the idea that came first. Then they had something to advertise.

Parting Thoughts

As you can see, our toolbox is no longer limited to words and pictures. We may still make ads, but we are no longer ad writers. As Teressa Iezzi wrote in her book by the same title, we are Idea Writers now. We're not in the business of just making ads. We're in the business of injecting ourselves into the culture, the conversation, the moment, and perhaps most important, the technologies and digital environments people are using to find content, information, and advertising that helps them.