I expected to come away from this conference inspired and full of insight that would give me a better understanding of how to be more creative when looking at designing an integrated marketing communications campaign.
I’m pleased to say that I learned so much more than expected. The first speaker at the conference was Anthony Tasgal who talked about needing more ‘ Creativity, Serendipity and Insight’. Some of the key points from his talk confirmed what I had previously read about content marketing and customer behaviour. Anthony pointed out that we now live in a society where we are ‘ data rich and insight poor’ and due to this abundance of data we have become too intent on focussing on analytics; he used the analogy of “ counting the bottles rather than describing the wine”. When you think about this analogy and marry it up with the fact that in order to truly engage with your audience you need to trigger an emotion (which you do by ‘ describing the wine….’) and if you can build in an element of surprise making that connection will be far easier and help you cut through at the same time. Being creative is not just about immersing yourself in your sector, you need external input to bring a different perspective and insight to the table. I believe that the external input allows for a richer dialogue which is often brought about by asking simple questions such as “ why are you doing it this way?” which can then lead on to finding the anomalies that can help with the creative process.
The third speaker was Nick Padmore from The Writer and he said that what defines good writing was ‘ Clarity’ and ‘ Surprise’. This obviously underpinned what Anthony Tasgal was saying with regards to creating surprise to make that emotional connection. Three suggestions that I found particularly useful that I will consider when looking at copy for any of my client’s projects were:
- ‘ Subvert the norm.’ An example of that might be to add a joke in to an ingredient list to bring in the element of surprise and
- ‘ Be honest’. Say the worst thing that people are thinking…. Being honest is one thing but this is about extreme transparency that will undoubtedly build trust.
The other speaker I found particularly interesting was Ringo Moss whose a Digital Strategist for McCann. I recently read that ‘ people share emotions, not facts’ and Ringo emphasised this in his talk. He outlined the creative challenge when looking at producing a mobile feed which he broke down in to three main areas, those being, frequency, speed and silence. What was interesting was the last one. I did not realise that 85% of people watch video on their phone in silence and this obviously has an impact on the content and its delivery.
If you get the opportunity to hear any of these speakers I’d thoroughly recommend taking it.