Burgers, baubles and barbies – lessons from the new series of Face 2 Face
As the top-ranking podcast returns for a second season, Facebook’s head of marketing, Alexandra Sloane, examines the key learnings from the marketing luminaries it features.
What have a disparate band of companies such as Netflix, Volkswagen, Vinomofo, Myer, KFC and the MLA got in common?
It’s simple: they’re some of the most creative marketing forces in Australia today, driving their businesses forward by embracing ideas that thrive in a connected world.
That’s the thread at the heart of the latest series of our Face 2 Face podcast, where marketers from the likes of Tourism New Zealand, Spotify, GroupM, Kathmandu, Optus, TBWA, Telstra and Xinja share their stories of success – and the occasional failure. You can click here to listen to the podcast series.
As a marketer, I couldn’t agree more with Clemenger BBDO Melbourne deputy CEO Gayle While when she says, “We’ve always believed creativity is always the answer, and I think in a world of more data and opportunity, there’s more room for creativity.”
Creative certainly sums up the approach they took to Myer’s last Christmas campaign, and rather than traditional big ‘Christmassy’ brand ads, they created a bauble which has quickly created a new tradition in the homes of thousands of its customers.
This bold move to create a tangible product (which parents can use to tell their children if they are naughty or nice) created online communities, keeping the campaign alive through the whole festive period organically, and with a built-in ability to drive loyalty in years to come.
This has allowed Myer, and Clems as its creative agency, to think differently about their marketing, and become more dynamic with activity than the quarterly cycles they had been stuck in.
“It’s always been a bit of an ‘and’ way of looking at the budget for us,” explains While. “What is the impact of having the above the line or the more traditional media with really smart and very targeted and optimised digital? How are we maximising the spending across both? And how are we really shifting the digital budget to then react to what we’ve seen the day before.”
We are also lucky enough to present one of the most fascinating marketing stories this year – how Meat and Livestock Australia’s New Australia Land campaign was pounced on so cleverly by Tourism New Zealand.
We had both Tourism New Zealand’s general manager for Australia, Andrew Waddell, and The Monkeys CEO, Mark Green, on the sofa discussing the two campaigns and how they complemented each other.
What is clear from their conversation is neither would have been possible if both didn’t have longstanding brand platforms to build from – you never lamb alone and 100% Pure, respectively.
Both campaigns were designed to drive conversation and talkability. For the MLA, this meant generating buzz around its tongue-in-cheek proposal to amalgamate Australia and New Zealand, and for Tourism New Zealand it was the opportunity to hijack the URL newaustralialand.com.au and put together a guerilla campaign to promote the land of the long white cloud.
“Adding to the conversation was central to what we did,” says Andrew Waddel. “It meant actually everyone won. Mark and I realised the lamb ad was in conversation at the start of the week; by the end of the week it was still in the conversation with a twist on it around New Zealand’s response; and then that just carried into the weekend.”
Curation is another way marketers are achieving cut-through, and it’s a theme we explore in several episodes this series. What I mean by curation is delivering your marketing to people in the places and formats they prefer, to make an impact in a world of infinite entertainment choice.
The very first episode explores a great example of this, with Tara Ford, executive creative director of DDB Sydney, unpacking the brave and disruptive strategy behind the Volkswagen Polo UNfail campaign.
It was a bold move for a massive auto brand to go beyond the traditional large TV campaign, and look to engage the target audience, 18-25 year olds, on the platforms and in a format that suits them.
Again I won’t ruin the story, as Tara tells it brilliantly, but the fact is it’s a clever use of creative execution and media, to push an unbranded and potentially ‘risky’ video out into the wild and let the audience share and discuss it themselves.
But for Tara, making this content which caught the eye was a non-negotiable. As she explains, “You’re up against everybody’s content. You’re up against Kim Kardashian’s butt, you’re up against a paragliding donkey. You’re up against Elon Musk’s rocket. There’s so many things that are awesome out there.”
That’s why making something people want to consume is so, so important today, and why this campaign was able to deliver huge increases in awareness and consideration for the Polo.
Ultimately, marketing all ladders up to driving outcomes like, well, sales. People have never been more empowered in their ability to learn about products and categories, or been given so much choice in how to access them.
Even a global brand like McDonald’s has the ability to disrupt their own brand…
Former McDonald’s Australia marketing boss Mark Lollback and his team introduced the Create Your Taste menu, allowing people to make their own customised burgers. As Mark (now CEO of GroupM) explains, it literally broke the fast food chain’s business model.
It was something that completely subverted what customers knew about McDonald’s, and the ‘UnMcDonald’s’ campaign which accompanied it also broke every code the brand had carefully cultivated over the last 50 years. And it worked wonders.
“Guess what happened when we launched Create Your Taste?” Mark explains. “Our whole business lifted. We sold more Big Macs than we ever had. We sold more cheeseburgers than we ever had. The whole business lifted because they saw the brand in a different way.”
The ability to change and surprise and delight the customer gets results, and can really drive the bottom line.
The stories I’ve outlined here are just a taste of what is contained in the eight regular and two bonus episodes of this series, where we also address purpose, authenticity, mental health and making truly creative use of your data.
Plus we get the CEO of a pretty major company to talk through what he admits is his one business “regret”, which happens to be an ad campaign.
I’m thankful this stellar line up of marketing leaders took the time to tell their stories to our host, Jules Lund, which we now share with you in Face 2 Face the podcast, series 2. I hope you enjoy listening as much as we did.