Red Balloon turns around new TV campaign in a week as marketers get increasingly nimble
Former tourism Australia managing director Nick Baker has shown the nimble approach he is going to take to marketing at Red Balloon after the brand turned around its latest campaign featuring five TV ads in just seven days.
The campaign went live last week and agency Absolute Content received the brief for five TVCs on the Monday after Red Balloon’s digital agency Deepend came up with the creative idea.
Red Balloon – Car Racing from Absolute Content on Vimeo.
Baker took over the leadership of the online gift aggregator and experience marketer earlier this year after his successful stint at the helm of marketing at Tourism Australia, where he set new benchmarks for global tourism marketing with campaigns such as Best Job in the World.
The shoot happened in the same week and the final ads were delivered to Red Balloon the following Monday.
Baker told Mumbrella the company could not make a move on the campaign until it was clear that its new website, developed by Deepend and using Adobe tools, was fully operational.
“We needed to make sure the website was working and then Deepend came up with this simple idea that the best presents can’t be wrapped,” said Baker
Nick Baker
“When you think of an idea you need a quick response, we needed to turn this around quickly.”
While Baker admitted it was “not the world’s most sophisticated idea”, it suited the brand perfectly and getting the campaign out quickly to capitalise on the Christmas season was crucial.
Agency founder Alistair Fysh, told Mumbrella the need to bring content in quickly was a growing demand of many businesses wanting to be nimble with their content.
He said with many companies running a “just in time” policy with logistics, there were also looking for their marketing to be able to match what their offers were.
While the Red Balloon work was created in just seven days, turning over work quickly was also increasingly important because of the ability to book media in a very short timeframe.
“Everything can be booked so late,” said Fysh.
“Most of our stuff is quick turnaround and a lot of stuff is done in the same months. You can maintain production values and still be nimble.”
Red Balloon – Day Spa from Absolute Content on Vimeo.
Red Balloon – Jet Pack from Absolute Content on Vimeo.
Simon Canning
Work on an election campaign and you might have less than 24 hours to create, produce, CAD, despatch and put to air. Doesn’t mean these ads are bad – they do the job perfectlywell, but many retailers would consider 5 days slow.
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“…getting the campaign out quickly to capitalise on the Christmas season was crucial.”
Becuase Christmas was only confirmed a few days ago. Sounds like trying to make a story out of bad planning and poor management of the cleint/agency relationship.
Sure being nimble is important but there is nothing in this campaign that couldn’t have been planned and executed better with more time, including testing a new website.
FYI Christmas is Sunday December 25th next year.
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Really? This passes as some kind of major discovery or benchmark? There’s plenty of quick turnaround retail work out there – and infinitely more complex than a gift….not to mention dynamically generated web video.
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Great work Nick and the RB team
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To quote RedBalloon – “not the world’s most sophisticated idea”, it suited the brand perfectly!!!
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Congrats to Claire and all the team, nice work.
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Another break through in rubbish & poor brand recognition.
How many people did they burnout in that week??
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Boring. Amateur. Fancy music to clips of experiences. Something that could have been done in iMovie. Nothing creative about this idea or execution.
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Are they really TV ads? Or are they just content for online? in which case digital ads? booking digital media in that time frame is easy. Not so with TV!
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Red Balloon is a digital business, yes?
• I searched to see if these ‘ads’ had been used in email comms, nothing.
• So i went to facebook to see if there were any RB posts with the ‘ads’ Nup.
• Then, to the RB website, surely these videos would be there. Not a chance.
(In fact it’s new website and a god-awful logo) What on earth is going on there?
So i look forward to seeing these ‘ads’ on tv some time soon?????
And by the way, that ‘ad’ with the race cars in slow mo…. does not look exciting. Looks like they are going through a school zone!
Bring back the excitement and fun. It’s all gone dreary, dull and undercooked. Smacks of in-house DIY.
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Did they not realise that Christmas was on the 25th this year? Why did they need to produce a last minute campaign?
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