MANILA, PHILIPPINES– With hundreds and thousands of content produced every second vying for your audience’s share of eyeballs, engagement and affinity – it’s an ongoing war of truly creative content.
Social media, short videos, and messaging altogether account for 62 percent of the discovery of new brands and products of consumers in Southeast Asia in a study by Facebook and Bain & Company in May. And they’re produced not just by brands but also by consumer’s close friends, their most favorite publishers and communities, and some influencers and creators they follow.
This battlefield is the very reason why words and phrases like “thumb-stopping”, “viral”, and “first 5 seconds” have cropped up. It’s the reason why platforms recommend best practices, subject to change every so often. Because in this fight to stand out, great creatives are crucial to winning share of heart, as well as share of pocket.
Dont sell a product, sell an idea
Depending on what your product is and where it’s available – your own brand.com, a listing on the marketplace, or even a brick and mortar store – the consumer journey can change. As evidenced by the increase in cross-shopping across multiple websites this year, new norms shape new purchasing habits.
As the innovations agency, NUWORKS, has previously presented, the constantly evolving decision making process calls for brands to offer delight across all of the experience touchpoints they encounter. What one sees, how to get it, how the environment makes one feel, steps to take – can change depending on the design of one’s experience. But what doesn’t change is the mindset of someone buying into what one is selling. His motivations, challenges, fears, ideas, values. So ask yourself, what are you selling? More specifically, what idea are you selling?
The role of creatives can help find the right key that unlocks that motivation – for people to come into your store, go to the product, and checkout. Or it can make them laugh uncontrollably because they heard something new. Or it can make them choose one brand over another because of something insightful. And that key is with a Big Idea. Micro-strategies such as a clear call-to-action and dedicated drive-to-site assets become supplementary tools that help close the loop– completing the story, and directing customers to the next step.
Call to action is just that – a call to act
It is a call to click, a call to discover, a call to buy, a call to love and engage with the brand. Defining the exact response you want out of your target audience can shape the development of creatives to make it more hard working, deeply insightful and impactful. A word of caution: while wanting creatives that can ‘do it all’ is forgivable human desire – it’s metaphorically the same as cramming 30 phrases inside a 5-phrase billboard for a 3-second drive-by. And in a highly-fragmented market, find this crucial factor – it is now an imperative to work with a team that is passionate about data. Choose a team that can unearth local insights and patterns of behavior that can identify the right context, right device, right delivery and right message to persuade a specific consumer action. More importantly, partner with those who are able to transform that data into something that inspires. As Anselmo Ramos once said, “Data is nothing without guts.”
‘Creativity’ shouldn’t be a word to describe the work. Creativity is a tangible solution to a unique brand challenge.
When a word as common as ‘creativity’ gets thrown around, it has a tendency to lose its meaning. But at the heart of it, creativity is a solution. And solutions can take the form of many things – the most common of which is coming up with new comms or a new kind of messaging. To address a brand’s challenge, one may want to re-introduce the product, or come up with a repositioning, or find something new to highlight that through research and testing, has been deemed desirable by the audience. In which case the task of Creatives is to find the most engaging, memorable execution out of the millions (apart from the millions that have already been done).
There is more to creativity than just that messaging
It’s unpacking truly piercing insights in the consumer mindset, finding an ‘abnormal’ behavior, an untapped point in the customer journey – and transforming that into something new addresses the brand challenges and arrests it. Creativity is unpacking the unique brand challenge and looking at it from all points, and putting innovative thinking into an engaging solution. The solution might not be a banner ad, it might not be always-on content, it might not even be Performance Creatives for now. And getting to those “might nots” is the journey to take with the Agency.
How should creativity be measured?
This year WARC and Cannes Lions launched the Creative Effectiveness Ladder that came from a study and analysis of 5,000 case studies from award entries and winners found in Cannes Creative Effectiveness Database, WARC Database and the IPA Databank through 2011 and 2019. This is just one of the frameworks and schematics that illustrate how creatives work in delivering marketing effectiveness for your brand.
What are the objectives? What’s the realistic budget? What’s the insightful strategy? And more importantly, what creative campaign can deliver that strategy in the most original and engaging way? According to WARC, there is conclusive data that work with award-winning qualities is far more likely to be effective than ordinary work. In this day and age, content isn’t just about quantity for the sake of being present – it should be able to directly contribute to short-term and long-term sales growth. And with the Agency, one can identify and make that more purposive especially for your emerging channels such as eCommerce. After that, it’s a matter of maximizing the output to see how far these campaigns can go and adjusting or ramping it up the media when positive results show up.
NUWORKS delivers bespoke Creative services across the eCommerce Customer Journey from Discovery to After-Sales Experience
NUWORKS has specialized teams and units of Creatives, Data and Analytics, Tech, Strategy and Insights, Media, all with a dedicated eCommerce business unit that can help brands create, develop and implement successful e-commerce campaigns and platforms, end-to-end. Together, they can determine the right questions to answer, set the exact objectives, unearth insights, analyze data and customer behavior, and from that, create original campaigns – whether it’s eCommerce Creatives that are lead-to or in-platform – that can drive results with an agile and robust media approach.
NUWORKS Commerce is the culmination of 11 years worth of experience and expertise in Digital that offers creative marketing solutions. Brands can explore different executions that address awareness, consideration and even conversion with the agency’s access to data, creativity and technology – all in-house – with purposive creatives hinged on meaningful human experiences.
Resources:
WARC, Cannes Lions (June 23, 2020) “Cannes Lions and WARC reveal secrets to creative effectiveness”
