Marketing Australia – February-March 2019

marketingmag.com.au

MARKETING 2019

60 INTERVIEW

tell that story through photography
or video. As big brands shed their
agency relationships they [seem to]
lose that capability.
You see it a lot with fi nancial
services companies; they say,
‘We want to be aspirational’.
What does that mean from a
campaign perspective? They get
this insight that people have an
entrepreneurial spirit, they aspire
to do things; so how do we, as a
fi nancial institution, help them?
How do you take that down to the
next level to create a campaign?
And then what are the actual
creative stories?
There’s a wealth of publicly
available data out there about real
customers talking – what they
like, what they don’t like, which
topics are interesting etc. So we’ve
developed a process that allows us
to basically segment that audience,
then look at the topics that are
unique to the audience that that
fi nancial institution is targeting
by comparing those topics to the
broader audience.
So if you’re in that audience and
you’re really interested in craft beer,
and you, as an audience group, are
talking about that a hundred times
more than the general audience of
the same segment, we know that
that topic makes you unique. If we
can fi gure out how to link that topic
to your objective as a brand, there’s
potentially something there where
we can wrap our messaging in the
different types of media that we
spit back to you around that theme,
which generally has a bigger impact.
And that is very interesting
because that’s kind of what a
creative agency does, right? But
you’re able to do this through the

dataset. You can come up with

10 ideas in an hour based on the

dataset; you have a low cost, quick

turnaround production arm, spin out

a bunch of different creatives, A/B

test it against a smaller audience

and fi nd out which piece actually

resonates.

It starts at the audience insight,

which traditionally sits in the

media arm, links in creative and

measurement so you start seeing

all of these cross-functional teams

being formed. It’s all because you’ve

just enabled this different way of

thinking about creative and this

different way of production.

How do you study the effi cacy of a

client’s competitors’ content?

There’s a tonne of cost pressure

on brands to reduce how much it

costs to create content. As a result

of that, they consolidate vendors

or they bring agency in-house and

do all these things to cut costs.

When you do that, you lose your

connection into a diverse set of

creatives and it starts to narrow your

ability to think, and you start to focus

on the category itself and only your

brand itself.

[Looking at examples of water

brands on Instagram] – they’re all

very Instagrammy. If you look at a

photo individually, they’re all very

aesthetically appealing and the

brand is clear. But when you start to

group them all together, they all look

the same, so the consumer is going

to have a hard time differentiating.

When we’re creating content,

we look at what’s happening in the

category, then we make sure that

the visual identity – calibrating the

variables – allows us to stand out

and differentiate visually from here.

What is the most interesting

trend you’ve seen develop in the

content space since you started?

Most of the changes I’ve seen have

been on the brand side. It’s funny,

when you’re a start-up, the strategy

becomes so clear because it’s so

ROI driven. When you become a big

company I think that starts to get

lost a little bit and you have all these

sacred things that you can’t mess

around with. Say a monthly print

catalogue – there’s clearly no ROI

and it’s super expensive, but you just

can’t mess around with it and no one

knows why.

I’m seeing that changing pretty

quickly, where brands are just

getting more comfortable doing

things they’ve never done before,

more comfortable with releasing

control, more comfortable with

working with newer partners. I

don’t know if that’s a function of

a turnover of marketers with the

younger generation or because

all this pressure to reduce costs

means they don’t have another

choice, but the tone of conversation

for a new or unknown vendor (like

us and some of our competitors) is

totally different than what it was a

year ago.

They were

literally sending

spreadsheets

around to the legal

team, to the PR

team, the marketing

team, the brand

team – all for 140

characters.