Maja Pawinska Sims, Weber Shandwick’s Editor, EMEA looks at the top six ways in which new technology and data are driving award-winning, creative brand communications. BREAKING BOUNDARIES INNOVATION IN THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES IS EVOLVING It started with the seed of an idea, driven by the rapid acceleration of technology: it was possible to create better and more beautiful work for brands by harnessing new tools to do things differently. When we started our innovation conversation last year with the first Weber Shandwick EMEA Innovation Tour, in parallel with the inaugural year of Lions Innovation at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, there was something in the air. Everyone was excited about how technology and data, combined with great creative ideas, were about to change everything we think and do as agencies, marketers and brand caretakers. And this seed has evolved over the past 18 months into six clear facets of innovation. The first of these is innovation in terms of the type of creative communications work being done. Combining technology with data- driven insights to engage audiences with extraordinary brand stories has grown from a groundbreaking idea in 2014/15 to being the basis of many Lion and other award-winning pieces of work in 2016. We’re now in that golden time when we’re not yet blasé: it’s real, and new, and still exciting. From virtual reality to artificial intelligence, work using innovative tech or machine learning is the stuff that makes brands glow and jurors go “wow”. This is partly because of its relative rarity: we’re not yet masters of our new box of tricks. Few brands are currently using VR and AR, sensors or sophisticated algorithms to their full potential, and the industry doesn’t yet have a substantial body of work, beyond a handful of multi- award-winning campaigns, that suggests it’s near the tipping point. Of course, now we’re getting more grown-up about applying innovative tools, we also know it isn’t just about being early adopters or showing off a cool idea (let alone spending budget) for the sake of it. In our excitement, we must exercise caution that we’re not producing an avalanche of innovative but essentially meaningless campaigns. The most impressive examples of this innovative new wave, as ever when we consider the power and value of creative communications in all its wonder and variety, have a wider societal impact. This is a subset of innovative work: big brands and charities combining data, tech and ideas to become more human and more relevant. All the energy, enthusiasm, passion and emotion that creatives bring to their work could be seen as being in conflict with the cold hard facts of data science, and yet the industry is coming round to the idea that they are complementary. With the caveat that data points are not in themselves insights, creative campaigns based on data can be more engaging, more effective, and have greater appeal to clients with business problems to solve. Our EVP, Creative Technology Strategy Patrick Chaupham, who was a Lions Innovation juror this year, said: “It’s been amazing to see how much AI is now featuring in campaigns, and how brands and agencies are using data. Brands already sit on top of a lot of data; it’s often about understanding how to identify and use existing data to unlock ideas and creativity, and inform or even reimagine your business. Combining technology and creativity might look complex, but taking the first step isn’t as hard as brands, creatives or technologists might think”. Brand work still has to tell a story and be authentic. But the lens of innovation can engage and provide insightful, customisable interactions with consumers. Related to this is the second branch of innovation: the maturing of digital and social media as a serious platform for innovative brand communications, driven by PR ideas. Digital and social media are becoming not just nice-to-have comms tools, but channels that can drive real business value. Making the business case for social (the topic of Weber Shandwick’s session at this year’s Social Media Week London) has become a priority, including smart use of data and persuasive presentation to senior management, and this may also mean that digital and social media strategies need to be completely reimagined. The third aspect of innovation refers to what creative agencies are starting to do beyond communications: working in partnership with clients to drive business innovation. The four-Lion winning House of Clicks “From VR to AI, work using innovative tech is the stuff that makes brands glow and jurors go wow.”
Transcript
Maja Pawinska Sims, Weber Shandwick’s Editor, EMEA looks at the top six ways in which new technology and data are driving award-winning, creative brand communications.
BREAKING BOUNDARIESINNOVATION IN THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES IS EVOLVING
It started with the seed of an idea, driven by the rapid acceleration of technology: it was possible to create better and more beautiful work for brands by harnessing new tools to do things differently.
When we started our innovation conversation last year with the first Weber Shandwick EMEA Innovation Tour, in parallel with the inaugural year of Lions Innovation at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, there was something in the air.
Everyone was excited about how technology and data, combined with great creative ideas, were about to change everything we think and do as agencies, marketers and brand caretakers.
And this seed has evolved over the past 18 months into six clear facets of innovation.
The first of these is innovation in terms of the type of creative communications work being done. Combining technology with data-driven insights to engage audiences with extraordinary brand stories has grown from a groundbreaking idea in 2014/15 to being the basis of many Lion and other award-winning pieces of work in 2016.
We’re now in that golden time when we’re not yet blasé: it’s real, and new, and still exciting. From virtual reality to artificial intelligence, work using innovative tech or machine learning is the stuff that makes brands glow and jurors go “wow”.
This is partly because of its relative rarity: we’re not yet masters of our new box of tricks. Few brands are currently using VR and AR, sensors or sophisticated algorithms to their full potential, and the industry doesn’t yet have a substantial body of work, beyond a handful of multi-award-winning campaigns, that suggests it’s near the tipping point.
Of course, now we’re getting more grown-up about applying innovative tools, we also know it isn’t just about being early adopters or showing off a cool idea (let alone spending budget) for the sake of it. In our excitement, we must exercise caution that we’re not producing an avalanche of innovative but essentially meaningless campaigns.
The most impressive examples of this innovative new wave, as ever when we consider the power and value of creative communications in all its wonder and variety, have a wider societal impact.
This is a subset of innovative work: big brands and charities combining data, tech and ideas to become more human and more relevant.
All the energy, enthusiasm, passion and emotion that creatives bring to their work could be seen as being in conflict with the cold hard facts of data science, and yet the industry is coming round to the idea that they are complementary. With the caveat that data points are not in themselves insights, creative campaigns based on data can be more engaging, more effective, and have greater appeal to clients with business problems to solve.
Our EVP, Creative Technology Strategy Patrick Chaupham, who was a Lions Innovation juror this year, said: “It’s been amazing to see how much AI is now featuring in campaigns, and how brands and agencies are using data. Brands already sit on top of a lot of data; it’s often about understanding how to identify and use existing data to unlock ideas and creativity, and inform or even reimagine your business. Combining technology and creativity might look complex, but taking the first step isn’t as hard as brands, creatives or technologists might think”.
Brand work still has to tell a story and be authentic. But the lens of innovation can engage and provide insightful, customisable interactions with consumers.
Related to this is the second branch of innovation: the maturing of digital and social media as a serious platform for innovative brand communications, driven by PR ideas.
Digital and social media are becoming not just nice-to-have comms tools, but channels that can drive real business value. Making the business case for social (the topic of Weber Shandwick’s session at this year’s Social Media Week London) has become a priority, including smart use of data and persuasive presentation to senior management, and this may also mean that digital and social media strategies need to be completely reimagined.
The third aspect of innovation refers to what creative agencies are starting to do beyond communications: working in partnership with clients to drive business innovation. The four-Lion winning House of Clicks
“From VR to AI, work using innovative tech is the stuff that makes brands glow and jurors go wow.”
campaign by our Swedish unit, Prime, for property portal Hemnet, is a great example of a communications agency using data and insights to carve out a completely new business sector for a client.
Our teams at Prime and United Minds worked with leading analysts and architects to transform data from 200 million clicks on the portal into plans for Swedes’ dream home, based on factors such as size and style. The impact went beyond huge media and social media reach: within weeks, hundreds of people from around the world had signed up to buy the “Hemnet Home” when it hits the market, to a value of $200 million.
It’s going even further: we’re seeing the emergence of “brand start-ups”: business prototypes where communications leads the way, based on solid market analysis and business valuation.
As Prime Partner and Executive Media Director Hannes Kerstell said at Cannes after serving on the PR Lions jury: “PR is not just about awareness or reach anymore – it can open up new business opportunities and create real value”.
At least two advertising agencies at Lions Innovation talked about their success in developing an entirely new division to act as an incubator, so they can offer branding and communications support to start-ups, helping to shape them from the earliest business development stages.
So who owns innovation? Which creative discipline? Which department? The fourth arm of innovation holds traditional agency and business structures up to the light and finds that innovation flourishes best in organisations that are themselves innovative in the way they operate and are led.
This could mean breaking down traditional intra- and inter-agency and client boundaries, barriers and silos, including talking to departments outside the marketing function, such as R&D and sustainability.
It might be about encouraging collaboration and partnership with third parties such as tech start-ups, social media platforms and data analysts, or building a collegiate working environment that encourages creativity and innovation, or embracing the benefits of true diversity (since no-one can realistically expect to produce work that truly engages diverse audiences without drawing on ideas from diverse teams), or adopting new ways of working such as agile project management.
James Nester, our EMEA Executive Creative Director, argues that the most innovative brand communications work is now about “blurring the lines, removing barriers that impede brilliant work. Account leads need to be the conductors of an orchestra, helping everyone play harmoniously together. This is the approach that will result in breakthrough work”.
Allied to this is the fifth element: adopting an innovation mindset. Again, this isn’t about having ideas for the sake of it. It’s about brand bravery, and challenging the myth of perfection. It’s about not getting overwhelmed or paralysed by big ideas. It’s about just getting started.
By its nature, to innovate is to test and learn, and to embrace that during the process, it’s likely that we are going to fail.
But rather than seeing failure as something that can or should be avoided in brand communications, an innovation mindset (enabled by and deeply necessary in a digital and social world) is about embracing failure: creative teams being nimble, adapting and evolving campaigns, or moving quickly past ideas that aren’t working.
The motto of the innovation mindset? “Let’s just try it”.
This is echoed by Simon Lowden, president of the global snacks group and global insights at PepsiCo, speaking at Lions Innovation: “Organise for uncertainty. Let people have space to try things and move on. Whatever you test internally, the world will tell you quickly
if you’re getting it right or wrong. It’s OK to be provocative, as long as it’s authentic and true to what the brand stands for. Try, learn, try again. Don’t get stuck in process: it’s much more important to do something than wait for everything to be perfect.”
There’s no guarantee that any mindset will lead to innovation every day, but many speakers at Lions Innovation agreed that optimism – a combination of positive attitude with a bias for action – helps. It makes you more open. It makes you more resilient so you can bounce back faster from ideas that don’t work. It also makes you more influential and inspiring, since you will need other people to help your idea come to life.
The final facet of innovation, which may be the key to achieving all of the above now and in the future, is talent. The continuing tension between creatives and tech/data experts needs to be resolved because, as we have seen, the really good stuff happens in the space where these two world views and sets of skills collide.
This could happen naturally, however: the next generation coming into the creative industry will effortlessly blend creativity with being digital, social and coding natives: they simply don’t see the divide.
This is backed up by academics like Aaron Hill, director of the MS Data Visualisation programme at progressive university The New School in New York, who believes his students are “just as much artists as scientists”.
So there you have the six aspects of innovation in the creative industries in 2016: brand comms that blends creativity with tech and data; the maturing of social and digital; work for brands that goes beyond communications into business development; innovative business structures and collaboration; adopting an innovation mindset; and the crucial element of talent.
But there’s one further question. What does all this mean for PR, specifically?
Great storytelling, understanding the consumer, developing a relationship between consumers and a company and its products, and great creative work are still at the heart of the best brand campaigns.
PR is perfectly positioned to be the most creative and innovative of all the communications disciplines. PR-led ideas can span all media, and can engage and motivate people to share and take action like no other discipline.
It’s still, in the end, about moments and people, not numbers and demographics. And that’s why, with the right talent, structure, and attitude, the new innovation landscape is the perfect arena for PR.
There’s a caveat here: while keeping the future in its sights, the industry also needs to stay focused on being innovative in the now, recognising that many brands are still getting a handle on mobile, never mind about VR.
As our Chief Digital Officer Chris Perry says: “Most urgently, innovation needs to play out in how communicators embrace mobile adoption, behaviours, expressions and value. This is the biggest and most immediate opportunity for creative comms strategies across all territories and sectors.”
There’s never been a more exciting time. As we head for Eurobest in Rome (which will again this year feature an “Innovation Day” as part of its schedule, and awards for the most innovative brand work), we can’t wait to see how innovation will crystallise for our industry over the coming year.
“The motto of the innovation mindset? Let’s just try it.”
THE NEW BRANDSTORYTELLING TOOLSWe’re barely beginning to imagine what the impact of digital, virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning and mobile might be on brand marketing.
Video is becoming more technical. And technology is becoming more visual. Short form, creative visual content is on the rise across mobile and social platforms, from the language of emoji to immersive VR and AR.
VR – which, according to industry analyst Digi-Capital, will be a $120bn business by 2020 – was, unsurprisingly, a key theme of sessions at Lions Innovation this year, as speakers explored how it will become the “new gold standard for storytelling”.This included Samsung hosting an interactive session (all 500 delegates experienced a VR film on a Samsung Gear headset – a first for Cannes) on how VR and 360° video will reimagine creativity, engagement, culture and even compassion. Dr. Chris Brewin, Professor of Clinical Psychology at University College London, discussed his study of the effects of VR on depression, including experiencing the world from an avatar’s perspective. Incredibly, early results seem to indicate that the method has been effective in boosting feelings of self-compassion and improving levels of depression by one third.
Other examples of how VR can transform perspectives include the New York Times Magazine, whose NYT VR app puts readers at the centre of its biggest stories through immersive 360° video experiences. But one VR campaign was light years ahead of the rest this year. Partnering with our sister company McCann and Framestore, aerospace company Lockheed Martin’s stunning Field Trip to Mars won 19 Lions in 11 categories, from Cyber to PR to Entertainment to Innovation: more than any other single piece of work.This was a group VR experience that took schoolchildren on a surprise virtual tour of Mars by rigging a school bus with tech to make the “view” look and feel like the Martian landscape, rather than the streets of Washington D.C. that the bus was actually driving down.
From the mysteries of human consciousness to exploring outer space (not to mention catching Pokemon), being curious and playing with the possibilities of this new experiential environment will keep brands relevant. Just wait until smartphones reliably get to 5G, and then watch VR and AR explode…
