Trust and creativity are crucial to a successful ad campaign. In fact, a recent survey on creativity found that 27% of industry executives thought the “dominance of technology, data and process” was the biggest enemy of creativity.  It’s time to put the human element and trust back into creative campaigns.

That’s why in a decade of rushed creatives, cookie cutter campaigns, and general dullness we have strived to continue breaking the trend and lead from the front, with rich creative executions and trusted customer service.

Building trust is always a tricky thing when collaborating on campaigns, especially when multiple parties are involved, but it needn’t be so tough. With just one simple step, you can start laying down foundations that are strong enough to allow a trusted process and campaign to be built upon. It all starts with a call.

Calling on creativity to kick off the campaign

With hindsight, the kick-off call was quite impersonal, with media owners huddled around a speaker phone, asking about objectives or assets.  That's only if they even went ahead, as some agencies preferred using a briefing form.

Now however, these have become video calls, where key subjects such as timings and KPIs are covered, with the added bonus of meeting new people, catching up with familiar faces, finding out who has the worst WiFi, and of course, starting to build trust.

In a recent survey, we asked our clients and agencies a series of questions to help us improve our creative services in 2022. An overwhelming 65.9% of respondents agreed that a kick-off meeting was their preferred briefing method.

It is on these calls where designers can make a real difference. As a designer myself I’ve always thought that it’s  a no brainer to have at least one creative mind on a kick-off call. Designers can come up with solutions quickly by thinking outside the box, answer the more technical questions and quite often, seal the deal. One of the highlights of a call is that every so often we hear the words “Creative wise we are not sure what is possible, so we’re happy to go with what you think is best.”

If this scenario pops up, having a designer at hand means that this question can be answered quickly and confidently, allowing trust to begin being built with the key stakeholders early in the process. These moments are rare but do happen across a wide range of sectors. For example, we partnered with Britvic and Disney Plus where creativity was imperative.

A brand new concept

Early in 2021, Britvic wanted to run a campaign focussed on their Double Strength Blackcurrant flavoured squash. On the kick-off call they outlined that they had a great library of assets but were unsure of how to utilise them and how to bring an element of interactivity to the campaign. One of the most important factors for them was to ensure that users understood that Blackcurrant was in fact a brand-new flavour.

Off the back of the call, an initial design concept was constructed, featuring cascading Blackcurrants which would animate as the user scrolls down the page. Fast-forward to mid-April and the campaign achieved an +18%* increase in awareness of the new Blackcurrant flavour, and when audiences were asked to name a Squash/Cordial brand, the Top of Mind Awareness of Robinsons was up 10%*, almost double the benchmark. “The creative surpassed our expectations and the attention grabbing blackcurrants that fell when the user scrolled down the page offered a more creative solution across our brands” stated Kelly Hilton, Head of Media at Britvic PLC.

The brand performance results delivered and attention stats proved that trusting creativity was the right flavour for this campaign.

Disrupting the game

Another great example of trusting creativity was in May 2021 when we ran a campaign for the Disney Plus series, Loki. On our first call we discussed the possibility of creating a disruptive concept that could play on Loki’s mischievous nature. This posed the question, how can you make an ad disruptive, let alone mischievous while sticking to the IAB guidelines? The answer – think outside the box, or in this case outside the Masthead.

Following this, a disruptive video was created, featuring elements appearing to ‘break’ out of the confines of the Masthead. In actual fact, they weren’t breaking any rules at all, an illusion that Loki himself would be proud of. This was a real creative risk for us and an ambitious concept, unlike anything we have done before. However the success of the campaign demonstrated the need for trust within creativity. The mock-up, coupled together with the video example, conveyed the idea both conceptually and technically allowing a unique concept that not only answered the brief, by producing view through rates of 68%*, exceeding the 60% benchmark set for the campaign, but also showed that once again that trusting creativity was the heart of the campaign. 

This trust and collaboration are key to creative campaigns and not only do designers wish for this, but clients and agencies too.

Driving real results

To support this further, a recent creative survey by us showed that 73.2% of our respondents are after collaboration between creative teams and their media partners and 24.4% are interested in media partners providing a tailor-made service.

The Britvic and Disney Plus examples prove that trusting a designer to introduce some creative flair, isn't just 'to make things look pretty' but to drive real brand results. Our creative survey shows there is a desire for collaboration but in reality, we see all too often a willingness to settle, citing budget, time constraints or spec limitations as excuses for formulaic 'creative'.  Trusting creativity is where the real brand results are made.