Meet the Forward: When the best creativity is invisible, how can we learn from it?

We need to stop fixating on the tip of the iceberg and understand the power of creativity below the brand’s surface. Because often it’s the invisible interventions and minutiae of creative craft that make the biggest difference.

Ben Essen

Chief Strategy Officer Iris

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Click to the ‘work’ section of an agency website and you are faced with a familiar sight: a patchwork of two-minute videos highlighting some of the best films that agency has produced.

Scrolling through these reels feels like scrolling through the feed of an aspirational influencer. Glossy, filtered images of a perfect end product which leave you with the feeling something has been edited out. These films are the tip of the creative iceberg, a carefully curated highlight with little indication what was really going on beneath the surface.

For any marketer looking to transform their brand, they are inadequate summaries. They show you where the brand ended up but provide very little insight into what it really took to get there.

For the best modern integrated agencies, 90% of the work the agency does is hidden from plain sight. The strategic machinations, the inter-specialism negotiation, the client collaboration, stakeholder management, creative experiments and marketing failures it took to get to success. The role of a modern marketer, and their agency, is as much about building the infrastructure for success as building the campaign that celebrates it.

In an omnichannel age when brands are built through the whole experience, not just the ads, the best creativity can often be invisible. It is harder than ever to work out what’s driving the success of the brands built through participation and customer experience. The best creative innovations can be only visible as an absence: the absence of a queue, or fewer negative comments on the Facebook page.

With these shifts in mind, Iris has reinvented how we share our work. Instead of a glossy reel or annual, we have launched a new seminar-based approach, where each client project is given a 30-minute-deep dive into what really went on. All the hidden details are revealed from the client-agency dynamic to the creative nuances hidden from the human eye.

And instead of these being an agency bragging opportunity, these are co-presented with the brand marketers responsible, to better reflect the client-agency collaboration that went on behind them.

SPEAKERS

Kelly McConville, Head of Social Media and Content, EMEA, Uber

Neil Manhas, MD, Pizza Hut Delivery UK, Yum! Brands

Tim Hulbert, MD & Group Head of Brand and Insights, Barclays

Tom Preston, Head of Online Retail, Samsung Electronics

KEY TAKE OUTS

Step back to move forward. The secret to a brand taking a bold leap forward is to realise the urgency of the business issue holding you back. For Barclays to align on the ground-breaking new sponsorship strategy that has led to them leading the professionalisation of women’s football in the UK, they had to interrogate a successful decades-old sponsorship model. Only through a thorough evaluation could they work out what elements to retain and which to reinvent.
Face the hidden elephant in the room. The most effective strategies are the ones that face down the problem that feels too big to tackle. Pizza Hut Delivery realised that the nation’s Domino’s habit was so ingrained people didn’t even notice they were doing it. The only way to break the habit was to call it out and wake the nation up to a superior alternative.
The smallest insights can be the most powerful. The industry likes to celebrate the ‘big idea’ and ‘universal insight’. But when you’re trying to build more culturally relevant marketing it can be the tiny nuances that count. Uber built a data-driven social content programme that accounted for the different needs of each city within 46 different markets. Only through a systemised approach to content segmentation and deployment could they understand key insights e.g. safety was less important in France; technology stories resonated most strongly with women in Saudi Arabia.
Every touchpoint is a brand touchpoint. Samsung realised that their investment in premium advertising was being undermined by a non-premium shopper experience in partner ecommerce channels. In a multichannel world, a brand is only as strong as its weakest touchpoint. To combat this issue, Samsung built an online retail excellence programme to ensure every minutiae of the brand experience was consistently excellent whether Samsung controlled it or not.
Reclaim the Case Study. Advertising is the only industry in which a ‘case study’ is a glorified sales pitch. In every other field, the case study is ‘a detailed account giving information of a project’s development, in order to show general principles.’ Meet the Forward exists to make case studies more transparent, more informative and more in-depth. As an industry we need to celebrate the substance as well as the gloss. We need to stop fixating on the tip of the iceberg and understand the power of creativity below the brand’s surface. Because often it’s the invisible interventions and minutiae of creative craft that make the biggest difference.

Guest Author

Ben Essen

Chief Strategy Officer Iris

About

As Chief Strategy Officer, Ben leads a diverse team of strategists across 17 offices for global creative innovation network, Iris. Ben is responsible for strategy and planning, helping some of the world’s most exciting brands like Samsung, adidas and KFC to take a bold leap forward and reimagine how they connect with people and culture. In his time at Iris, Ben has worked side by side with CMOs to change their approach to marketing, spent weeks in the field trying to unlock the insights that will drive truly breakthrough work, produced global intelligence studies outlining the new marketing fundamentals and been a driving force behind Iris' uniquely 'For the Forward' culture. He is now on a mission to turn consumers back into citizens.