Sharon Zeev Poole is the founder and Director at Agent99, Elzanne Strydom is the founder and CEO of Connected Culture and Dan Beaumont is the founder and Managing Director of GAME Creative Advisory.
Marketers know that the risks brands take today often won’t see results for six months to a year. So, given today’s tough economic climate, when companies want to see ROI now, getting brands to take chances and invest in innovative ideas is no easy task.
They recently shared their views on innovation in public relations, branding and digital marketing. Each revealed what they were doing to develop innovative ideas for clients during this challenging time.
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It’s fascinating because there are two distinct schools of thought in the industry at the moment: the long-term brand-building school of thought and the short-term programmatic, measuring school of thought. And it’s obviously clear and it should be clear to most good marketers and most agency people.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy and welcome to Managing Marketing. A weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you are enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
Marketers know that the risks brands take today often won’t see results for six months to a year. So, given today’s tough economic climate, when companies want to see an ROI now, getting brands to take chances and invest in innovation ideas is no easy task.
Leading Sydney PR agency Agent99 recently hosted a panel event on this very topic with three Sydney-based independent agencies across public relations, branding, and digital marketing. Each revealed what they are doing to develop innovative ideas for clients during this challenging time.
To discuss the risks and benefit of innovation in marketing, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, Sharon Zeev Poole, founder and director of Agent99. Welcome, Sharon.
Sharon:
Hi, Darren, thanks for having me.
Darren:
You’re welcome. Elzanne Strydom, founder and CEO of Connected Culture. Welcome, Elzanne.
Elzanne:
Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the discussion.
Darren:
And last but not least, Dan Beaumont, founder and managing director of GAME Creative Advisory. Welcome, Dan.
Dan:
Thank you, Darren. Good to be here.
Darren:
Look, I want to start first of all, exploring this idea that’s almost implicit in the way we think, that innovation is somehow harder when economic times are tougher and possibly when we should be more innovative. First of all, with you Sharon, do you think that marketers find it harder to be innovative when the economy’s tightening?
Sharon:
Yeah, I think they do, largely because it’s very much around just being risk averse, that they’re having to really report in internally, they have to make a case for every dollar that’s spent, they have to manage up. And when you’re seeing a lot of redundancies, et cetera across the board, it’s just that risk becomes something they simply don’t want to take, so they want to stay safe.
Darren:
I think, certainly on a personal level, we’re seeing a lot of redundancies at the moment across the industry, and particularly in technology. That’s certainly something that would make anyone feel unsafe at this time.
But Dan in your career, have you ever known a marketer that has too much money that they’re willing to splash it around for innovation?
Dan:
No, I haven’t. I think marketers are always crying poor, and rightly so, because they would love more to do more. But I think when the economy does slow and those marketers are under real pressure to get a greater return on an investment for an organization, the challenge becomes what you do with that money and where you spend it in order to stimulate demand as quickly as possible.
And in a short-term environment, you’re certainly not thinking beyond six months or beyond the quarter. So, the pressure is on to use the money that they’ve got (and defend the money that they’ve got) in the most efficient way they possibly can.
Darren:
Well, Elzanne but this is an area that — your work, your agency is about performance marketing and certainly marketers are looking for perhaps more certainty, if not more immediacy in the response to their investment, aren’t they?
Elzanne:
Yes. We are very much in the data-driven optimisation space. And so, I guess the positive for us is we can test and we test the all-time. We’ve got to be very agile in adapting strategies and campaigns to give them the most cost-effective solution.
Innovation is constant with the data engines, so there’s no lack of innovation. It sometimes actually overwhelms the client or the opportunities out there and we can’t go after all the nice, blingy little things. So, the smart ones have got the innovation or testing budgets and we find those clients actually build brands that stand the test of time, and they lean in in tough times.
Darren:
Elzanne, but what does innovation look like when you say they’ve got budgets? Are they actually testing different mixes or different messaging or?
Elzanne:
It’s messaging, placement, audiences, creativity, and what lands with which age group. We can test all of that, and we do. It’s scary to say that it all comes down to the first three seconds, but not always. If we build more lasting campaigns, we can see that in our testing.
I guess their biggest innovation is not to … with AI because AI is all possible, and some of it is spitting out not good creatives and not always the right long-term strategies. So, we try to balance that out a little bit of, yeah, let’s try this new little thing that Google says we should, but balance that with good business sense and marketing practices.
Darren:
Sharon, obviously from an earned media perspective, there is an immediate response, isn’t there? But what are you finding as far as marketers approach to innovation in PR?
Sharon:
Well, I think the biggest thing is there’s a misconception around what being innovative in PR means. And oftentimes I think marketers think that that equals a huge activation, a large spend, something that has never been seen before.
There’s so much pressure on PR to deliver that viral moment, but that’s not really what it’s about. I think that, as we all know, the landscape has changed so much and to connect with audiences, you can do that on a fairly low budget these days.
So, being innovative is not about necessarily spending more, it’s about being smart and knowing where your target audience is, what they’re doing, how they’re behaving, and what are the platforms that are sitting in front of you that you can actually just, as Elzanne said, test on those platforms and see how it’s working for you.
So, PR has really evolved hugely, and therefore you can be creative, and you can test and learn and do things on a much smaller scale, and then scale it up if you need to.
Darren:
I think it’s moving beyond what often called the trick stunts and novelties of events and activations into building a more strategic approach.
Sharon:
Exactly. Absolutely. And that’s what we’re really seeing across the board, marketers are curious. But like Elzanne said, it’s overwhelming sometimes as to the options and the choices, and the fragmentation of audiences has resulted in that big question mark of where do I actually spend, where do I go with this, where is the ROI going to come from?
Darren:
Because Sharon, I can see where Elzanne’s talking about investing in … well, it’s almost like investing and testing the mix to see how to optimize it. But I guess a lot of marketers wouldn’t think of PR or in earned media in the same way.
They may not think that there’s that many variables. I see lots of variables in performance media. What are the variables? Can you give an example, perhaps, to bring that to life of an innovation that’s not one of these big activations?
Sharon:
I can give you lots, but for example, we’ve got a furniture brand at the moment that is testing linkby as a platform. So, linkby as a platform, is fairly new in the scheme of things but we are using earned media content to put out into market. So, this could be in the form of a press release on a new range, et cetera, we’re utilizing that as a traditional earned first approach.
Once we are done with that, we move the content onto linkby, and then there’s an affiliate opportunity for media to pick up this content and run with it. And it’s at a very low cost to still achieve good cut through and a lot of audiences back to their website, which is really important. So, that’s just a small example of something that a furniture brand is doing currently that we’re working with, and that wasn’t there before as an innovation.
And again, it comes down to just testing small things sometimes that are at your fingertips and repurposing the content that you are already creating. We’ve had other campaigns where we’ve created, for example, DISCUS is the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. We promote U.S. spirits here in Australia with a mandate to engage with trade, engage with consumers, just increase the visibility of different spirits brands.
So, we created a coffee table book, again, not so new. However, how we were able to connect with bartenders who took 23 different spirit skus to create content, put it into a beautiful coffee table book, then PR’d the heck out of it. And the 23 bartenders amplified the content across their social media channels. It was a huge success for them (DISCUS), and the brands got listings in these top tier bars that they would’ve never been able to achieve on their own.
So, that’s what I mean by innovation. That wasn’t a huge spend. So, it’s just utilizing smart ideas, but also understanding where your audience sits and what’s at your fingertips.
Darren:
It’s a little bit back to the future there, it’s sort of reinventing the coffee table book for promoting spirits. But Dan, in many ways, I guess people would hear about GAME Creative Advisory, that’s often called the top of the funnel, the content producers that are creating or driving consideration that can then be converted further down, where’s innovation occur at that level?
Dan:
I think it’s interesting, as Sharon’s just outlined, short-term tactics that come from the right brand strategy are absolutely the right approach — it’s even more important when trying to stimulate demand and drive sales when the economy is under pressure.
The top of the funnel is more long-term brand thinking that might only reap rewards 6 to 12 months down the track. So, I guess, the big point is being somewhat prepared for a downturn in an economy, isn’t it? Because it doesn’t necessarily come out of nowhere.
And being able to have long-term strategies that are still driving future cash flows in the next 12 to 18 months, but also having short-term tactics that perhaps focus more on the bottom of the funnel in traditional language terms to drive sales with the 5 to 3% of people who currently are in market right now.
The 95:5 rule is a really interesting one when the economy comes under pressure. Because it might actually shift to a 97:3 rule when you’re only talking to 3% of your total audience that’s in the market at any one time as people opt out of buying when disposable income becomes tight, and the economy is tough.
Darren:
It’s a good point because we have seen quite a number of traditional performance only marketers, now consider what do we need to do at the top of the funnel to build consideration so that we can convert more of them further down. Elzanne, is that one of the innovations? Are you on mute?
Elzanne:
It’s an innovation that comes into play if it’s not there. It’s the ones that haven’t considered the brand, and then they want to just really just do the bottom of the funnel the whole time, and it runs dry. If they haven’t invested in the 6, in the 12, in the 18 months, they run dry.
I mean, our biggest e-comm brands are opening shops. I mean, Kardashian wouldn’t be opening Skims if that was a bad idea in a major city in the U.S., it’s needed. So, we are innovating backwards. Yes, it feels like that, but we feel it. We just say, “You’re running dry. You just want the bottom of the funnel.” No one wants that message day in and day out on site.
Darren:
Well, and also you are inclined to just be converting, as Dan alluded to, the people that are already there. Whereas there is the opportunity to actually expand that pool of people that are in the consideration, or the purchasing process isn’t there?
Elzanne:
Absolutely. Yeah. You’re not taking market share, that’s for sure.
Darren:
I’m just wondering, and I’ll open this to all three of you, do you think coming out of the pandemic, and the reason I raised the pandemic was it was such a disruptor for business generally. Do you think innovation has become more considered or less considered? Are people perhaps more open to innovation now or less because of the disruption that we went through in the pandemic? Yeah, Elzanne.
Elzanne:
I think what happened is adoption was key during the pandemic. So, the adoption to purchase differently, to be closer to the manufacturer, to just wasn’t buying online, wasn’t using their phone to do social buying, all of that, that adoption curve just, I mean, it accelerated I think it bought 10 years closer into a two-year span. So, that happened, and then the overwhelm immediately happened thereafter.
It’s too much. I don’t want out. I’ve opted out. I want to go back to the store. It was almost like the six months after we opened up, there was this big backlash. There’s still some of it but I think what the pandemic did for us, it innovated, and the adoption curve just squashed within two years definitely.
Darren:
And Sharon, we did see a big change with PR because we’ve gone from journalists and traditional media relations to a much broader palate, you alluded to it before. We’ve got everything from influencers to new social and connection platforms. Has that made a big impact in the way marketers think about innovation?
Sharon:
Yeah, I think it has. But what I’m finding quite interesting, and maybe this is a bit broad brush, but the pandemic forced us into adapting. Absolutely forced us, we had no choice. Well, we’re back to choice now. And I think that it comes back to that kind of bell curve of who are those innovators? And they tend to be a much smaller group of people that truly are brave enough to try different things.
So, I think that even though the economy is pushing us to innovate and be scrappy almost in the similar way to what the pandemic was doing, you’re not being forced in the same way, you’re not actually being forced. It’s not a do or die situation so much.
It may be for some, but not in the same way — I don’t think we see it in the same way as we did during the pandemic. So, we find that we are leading that conversation with clients a little bit more, whereas before, they were forcing it.
And now as agencies, we’re having to put those options in front of them and sell it in even harder than we would’ve have previously, because they were willing to do anything to survive. Whereas now it’s kind of a little bit back to, well, ‘we’ve got options now’. We have options. The same sort of options we had before.
Dan:
So, I think-
Darren:
Yeah, Dan.
Dan:
During the pandemic, there were business models that were under threat, weren’t there? I mean, as you say, people were doing whatever they could to survive, even though their entire categories might have just collapsed in on themselves, and they couldn’t function and operate as a business the way that they had been used to for so long.
So, it caught a lot of people by surprise, and that forced innovation meant that they actually had to change what they were doing fundamentally in order to still turn revenue or find a market for their products and services. So, it put a lot of people under pressure, didn’t it?
Whereas you say now with the economy just slowing and disposable income drying up, people really struggling to make ends meet, it just means that demand is slow. So, that requires a different type of innovation in order to sell through at the same amount of units that you might’ve experienced just after the pandemic.
Darren:
Because I’m sitting here having a conversation with three people that would’ve been called indies I guess, all people that own their own businesses, some of many years, some of many months in your case, Dan. But that’s what I think’s interesting, is that innovation’s not just happening for marketers, it’s actually happening in the industry and in the business.
We’ve seen a huge change in marketers being much more open to considering indies, whereas maybe previously they ran for the security of the big network companies that had PR and had data and performance and creative.
I personally think that the pandemic caused some of that rethink about what the security of your partners meant. But Dan, do you think that’s had the same impact here? Do you think that that disruption creates opportunity for yourself, for instance, to start a new model for your type of business?
Dan:
I think so. It seems like such a long time ago that we went through all of that drama.
Darren:
It’s four years. It’s not that long ago. What short memories we have.
Dan:
Because things have seemed to have snapped back to normal so quickly, where when you do cast your mind back four years, the mind boggles a little bit as to what we were all going through and how we were all trying to adapt to a new way of working.
And if you remember, a lot of people were saying that the pandemic just accelerated change that we were already experiencing. So, it just added a turbo to it, and things just happened a lot faster under extreme conditions.
For our industry, since the pandemic, things have changed significantly, especially the pressure that all businesses are under, indie agencies, multinationals and our client partners, we’re all under the same economic pressure.
Certain trends within the agency world have meant that our margins are tighter and our business models need to flex in order to survive and the indies are certainly doing a great job of adapting, they’re far more nimble and agile and able to change how they go about doing business when they’re not attached to a multinational process or a way of working that is dictated from another part of the world.
Darren:
Elzanne, you are working in an area that’s very technology driven, and technology has the ability to drive change, drive innovation, in fact, much of it. But we’ve seen this happen to the very large tech companies that once you get to a certain size, innovation becomes difficult, doesn’t it?
Elzanne:
It does. They get stuck. And then here comes TikTok is now huge as well, but I mean, it was small and look what it’s doing to Google and Meta, and well, it did force them. They were two, it took them two years, forced them to innovate, and they have they’re coming out of the box again.
I think in terms of an agency now, one, I love the fact that I’m indie, they’re agile, the nimble, the adaption, don’t have these big cost structures. I have seen a lot of people who ran bad agencies go under in the pandemic, just fat and happy, so, that took care of that.
And we who have understood that we are both creatives, we are data scientists, and we need to be, technologists are the ones that’s driving it forward. So, that unicorn is, I want three horns now when I look for people to work for me. You can’t just be … crat. They got to understand that-
Darren:
The tri corn, perhaps.
Elzanne:
The tri corn, perhaps that’s the thing we’re going to term, but honest to God, we are technologists because these platforms are just running at speed. So, it’s where we are at. Well, it’s still exciting. I’ve done ads for 25 years and it’s still exciting, so-
Darren:
Sharon, what about from your perspective, your business, is it still driving innovation because of that nimbleness? And do you find that your clients are looking to you to actually almost be an outsourced source of innovation or creative thinking?
Sharon:
Yeah, absolutely and that’s the thing. PRs have always had to be creative because for us, we get briefs from brands at such different stages of their lifecycle. It could be a brand-new product sku, and that’s something new, newsworthy and interesting, but then we might get something that’s been around for 20 years and how do you make that newsworthy again?
So, we’re always having to be ahead of the curve as far as the creativity’s concerned and more and more there’s pressure on an integrated approach too. So, we can’t just be focused on media relations, for example, ideas have to bring in earned, owned, and paid.
So, there’s real pressure on us as practitioners to stay ahead of the curve and there’s a lot of training and teaching that’s going on within our agency and across the board to just understand all of the different disciplines, because we have to bring that into the conversation. It might be earned- first led, but it has to be supported by an integrated approach across different disciplines.
So, certainly we are being asked to be a lot more innovative and understand a data-driven approach. And I think what for me is important, is for marketers on the whole, in terms of innovation, is to understand the impact that campaigns are making.
What are you doing with your campaigns and how are you measuring success,s and how is that driving impact for your business? For us, with PR, it’s always been about the vanity metrics of reach and number of clips, et cetera. It’s just so not about that anymore.
It’s really understanding the depth and understanding the backend and the performance of the campaign and how is that driving impact? How is that driving leads, traffic, conversions, share of voice. There’s just so much more to it. So, innovation is not just about the approach, it’s really about understanding how it’s impacting the business.
Darren:
So, how are you driving that within your own organization? Because to offer innovation to your clients, you need to have a way of fostering and developing that and you said there’s training and things like that. Is there a percentage of your budget that you put into that or is there regular processes that you do with your staff to keep them at that edge of opportunity?
Sharon:
It has to be led from the top and it’s something that I’m super passionate about because I know there’s so much more to it. And as a boutique agency – , there are so many boutique agencies, how do you stand out? And I think understanding how PR impacts business, really sets us apart. So, it’s something that I’m really committed to.
And so, training started with me a few years ago, really understanding how Google analytics works, how everything we do connects back to the website and to measurement and to those markers, and how it connects to SEO for example, what is “Google Juice”? What are we producing that is resulting in a large footprint digitally for a business?
So, it started with me and I’m passionate about it, and then I make sure that my team is trained on that, and are also being held accountable to reporting to their clients on a regular basis on all of those metrics.
So, we set KPIs that ladder up to the objectives, and we measure digitally. We understand those numbers in a way that so many PR practitioners simply don’t, and I think it’s just the way of the future. It’s part of survival and PR to be treated not just a “fluffy tool” but something that’s absolutely imperative, and is driving actual performance.
Darren:
Thanks Sharon. Elzanne, you are in an area that is very data based. As you said, there’s data science is core to it. Do you think sometimes when you use words like data science, that there could be a perception that somehow creativity and innovation aren’t part of that?
Because I was actually a scientist before I got into advertising and people had said, “Oh, that’s such a big change, you’ve gone to something very creative.” But science itself actually has a huge creative and innovation component. How do you communicate that to clients, for instance, or even your own staff?
Elzanne:
So, how do I say we empower e-com to scale sustainability? So, we have to have data paid with creative strategies to deliver growth. I guess that’s what I always say. Data driven approach, paid with creative strategies to deliver growth.
So, creativity is not just in the pretty picture but in the creative strategies and platforms we employ to give you that sustainable growth. I guess I’m spoiled because of the data and the BI. I can easily prove what we do, and we can do it; it doesn’t take long. And then it’s teaching your clients what dashboards are important and what are not and teaching your staff the same thing.
Because, I mean, how many numbers do you want to look at? And the creativity—it’s so simple. It’s an A/B test, and it’s two different outputs: the data, the ROI, and the money you made. So, we do a lot of reporting but try to keep it at the client-level dashboard, and yeah, we prove what works and what doesn’t.
Darren:
So, that appeals to the client that’s looking for certainty in an uncertain world, because there is no certainty, is there?
Elzanne:
No, there isn’t. I try and tell stories when I onboard clients of what successful brands do and what they don’t do, and talk about testing budgets. Even if I just get 5%, even if I can just get 5% of the 100, 000 you’re going to give me this month for testing. And it grows over time, the clients that stay with us, that part grows and that’s where we innovate and it’s that money that we then try new platforms such as Tiktok.
Darren:
So, they see the return on investing in that area for innovation.
Elzanne:
Then there is growth, and then we can apply it to testing new platforms. Sometimes, we fall into the wall, but yeah, and we try to get it as a discipline.
Darren:
Dan, this is really unfair, but in some ways, you are the antithesis because you represent the storytellers, the round pegs in the square holes, the people that think of the things that don’t exist and ask why not.
But how do you get clients to manage their perception of risk in taking an innovative approach to creativity and to the work that you and your partners do?
Dan:
I’ve been listening to everything that Sharon and Elzanne have been saying, and it’s fascinating because there’s two distinct schools of thought in the industry at the moment, isn’t there? Between the long-term brand building school of thought and the short-term performance based school of thought.
It’s clear to most good marketers and most agency people that it’s not either/or it’s got to be a combination of those two things. One feeding the emotional connection and driving consideration down to the bottom of the funnel.
It’s a difficult situation when things are tight and budgets are tight, and the economy is slowing – as business wants more certainty. It’s not about taking risks, I don’t believe. It’s about calculating what you need to do, it’s about having a strong strategy and executing that strategy in the most creative way possible.
And innovation comes from a creative place. It rarely comes just from data, it doesn’t come from numbers, it’s got to come from finding a need with a consumer, leveraging an insight, shifting a product service that makes it more appealing to a human being.
And that’s the bit that that creativity is focused on, helping brands to connect with human beings and being more appealing at an emotional level, telling a story for a brand that actually then returns for business in 6 to 12 months’ time.
Darren:
I’ve just noticed the time it’s getting away from us, but I wouldn’t mind getting from each of you, from your experience, what do you see as the way your clients define innovation in their relationship with you?
What are the times where they’ve come to you and said, “This innovation’s really paid off.” And secondly, and we’ll get to, what are the ways you mitigate risk for them? And Sharon I’ll start with you. What are the things that your clients have said to you are really great examples or great ways of innovation?
Sharon:
I think it really comes back down to that great idea. They still come back to, “Well, good PR is a great idea that achieved cut through.” So, they see that as innovation, whereas I see innovation so much more broadly these days.
As I mentioned before, it’s more about connecting with your audiences and understanding their behavior and building that into the plan. So, I think it’s still about that great idea and I support that.
But sometimes a great idea can actually mean just going back to the basics and doing that really well after you’ve tried all of these different stunts and things that haven’t really quite paid off. So, we’ve had clients who’ve defined it as, “Actually, we just want to go back to what we were doing really, really, really well before. Can you do that for us?”
Darren:
And how do you mitigate risk for them? How do you make them feel more comfortable with going down that innovative path?
Sharon:
We are huge into setting KPIs. We really feel that it’s necessary and for every client brief, that looks completely differently, because what they’re trying to do is different. And so, we set KPIs at the beginning of the campaign and we try to tie it back to those objectives.
Because oftentimes, again, with PR it’s really easy to run away and think something is an amazing success because you got a piece on news.com.au but that’s not where we are. We want to go back and look at how did that convert for you? Did that create impact? Did it change perception of your brand in market? Let’s go back to what we were actually trying to do.
So, we set KPIs from the very beginning that ladder back to those objectives, and that makes them feel a lot more comfortable and safer, because we all know what success looks like from the outset, and we just steer right back to that at different junctures across the campaign.
Darren:
Even if direct attribution isn’t possible, at least the overall innovation is delivered a result, yeah?
Sharon:
Correct. And we negotiate that before we get carried away and excited by different things and look at the shiny balls. We keep going back to what were we trying to do, and ask if we actually achieved that?
Darren:
So, Elzanne, are you able to feel comfortable dealing with that level of uncertainty as a-
Elzanne:
Yes.
Darren:
Data scientist? I’m glad to hear it because there is a certain level of uncertainty in life that we have to deal with, we are human after all. But what do you think clients are looking for when they say they want innovation from you and how do you mitigate risk?
Elzanne:
My clients, all clients, I’m the return on investment girl, so I guess, yes, my dollar give me 20 back. Everything is about the sale. I find, yeah, most clients are shortsighted. There’s very few that … it’s a process of learning that together with the client that performance marketing actually, we believe in storytelling. We believe in creativity.
So, innovation from a performance marketing is all about cutting edge tech, like AI, the machine learning, the advanced data analytics to optimize the campaigns that delivers the powerful results. And they can see that when we implement the new Google Performance Max or Meta Advantage+ campaigns, they can see how we can track it across the channels and the brands that allow us to do that to get the results.
So, that’s all data driven, a bit of a show and tell. But yes, again, I guess we are spoiled in this. We have to be careful not to just charge ahead sometimes. Sometimes the client’s not ready.
Darren:
Thank you. Dan, one of the things I’m enjoying at the moment is the conversation in the industry amongst marketers saying to play it safe is to waste your budget. Because if you’re not standing out, you’re not actually achieving anything.
How do you think in your role that you can help reinforce that to clients, help them embrace the uncertainty of innovation, and also at the same time mitigate the risk associated with it?
Dan:
Darren, I think there’s a few things going on there and there’s also some new developments and new research results coming through into our part of the world that is enlightening. There’s been some work from Adam Morgan and the IPA in the UK, which has suggested that dull advertising actually costs you a lot more than creative advertising does.
Because the engagement levels are so low, you need to spend more on media in order to get the reach and to get the impact from a dull campaign. All of that work’s been done in pounds, so it’s very difficult to be able to equate that into Australian dollars.
They has come to the conclusion that dull campaigns need about 10 million more pounds in media, to achieve the same results that creative campaigns do. That’s telling, isn’t it?
So, that science and that research that’s coming through is obviously helping us to be able to encourage clients to take more risks in their work and particularly in how they connect with their audience.
In my experience, the word innovation is probably used slightly differently in that not many clients go to their agencies looking for innovation because by their definition of that word, which describes product innovation or a service feature innovation, or request a totally new vertical for their business entirely. I think that’s the way that organizations think of innovation.
So, perhaps what they’re asking of their agencies is a more effective way to connect with an audience, to sell the same product in a different way. And I think that’s where creative agencies can add a lot of value, is helping to reposition brands, but find really innovative, interesting ways to bring people and brands closer together in order to try and sell the same thing in a different way.
I can imagine the brief to the agency for a new product innovation would be enormous and very thorough, and almost quite risky handing that responsibility over to an advertising agency or a creative agency to come up with a new product idea. It happens, but it’s rare.
Darren:
Look we’ve run out of time, but I’ve really appreciated this conversation and the three perspectives that each of you have brought to the discussion. So, Sharon, thank you very much for bringing the PR perspective, and Dan for the brand perspective, and Elzanne for the performance perspective, let’s say.
Elzanne:
Thank you. Thank you.
Sharon:
Thanks a lot.
Elzanne:
It was so much fun. Thank you.
Dan:
Thank you, Darren.