Two Cents: The Power of Dance

Thu, 06 October 2011 8 Comments

about this blog

Two Cents

Sam Geer and Alex Ryan are two young thinkers trying to make their way in a big agency. Working at MediaCom, they're passionate, media savvy and unashamedly opinionated, standing up for the belief that young people need a voice in this industry.

“Our insights taught us something valuable – our audience was 'crying out' for a 'customised brand experience' tailored to their needs. For this reason we referred to them as 'systematic enabling migrators' or in laymen’s terms 'urban regional dependants'…”

We get accused of spruiking a little too much these days and I can’t imagine why?

It’s funny old industry. It would have to be the only place where success isn’t always measured by its profit and loss but rather on the opinions of award judges that are strangely made up of our competitors. But who can blame us right... when you’re selling ice to Eskimos there’s no doubt that you have to sell it well and I guess we fall into the habit of glitter-rolling the ice-block.

For this reason, I’m taking a stand. Hold onto something because it’s time to share with you the first-ever honest media award entry.

Challenge

We encountered various challenges in delivering successful communications for our client.

There was a problem, we had a client that recently read an article about Facebook, virals and hash-tagging and was convinced they had now graduated from the school of “new media”. Once they finished telling us about their great idea for a flash mob, our challenge was clear. Politely convince our client that it was in their best interest to let us do our job.

Strategy

With this in mind our strategy was simple.

Show them various examples of failed flash mobs and talk them through the related expenses, risks and potential embarrassment.

We put together an impressive strategy and idea presentation that received glowing feedback. Only to receive an email soon after with a request to return to the flash mob idea.

In order to post-rationalise a strategy for the client's idea, we had to develop a strategy that would allow us to say our brand was single-minded and unapologetic.

Our strategic platform was simple.

“The power of dance”

Activation

We reluctantly did a flash mob. Our activation strategy was simple, we wanted to “own YouTube”...  So in a stroke of genius, we uploaded the video to YouTube.

Results

We lost respect from our peers, target audience and the media community.

We ensured that a cut down TVC was placed during the client’s favourite program resulting in a frequency of 4x. The client’s nephew could recall the tagline and resulted in a 3x uplift in client relative ad message retention.

The application was subsequently showcased at seven of the client’s dinner parties via mobile within the first month.

So there it is and yes, I know what you’re thinking... Why would we give you, our competitors, an insight into what is clearly a best-practice, nomination magnet... Well Timmy, sometimes the work just speaks for itself.