10 ways to turn drinks advertising into engagement

Mark Boyd, founding partner of creative marketing agency Gravity Road, reveals his tips on how to stop advertising and start engaging with your consumer base.

We care about our brands – we distill, brew and craft them with extreme care and we have so much we want to talk to consumers about.

But increasingly, brand comms are feeling rather self-centred; almost like the dinner party bore, brands are shouting so long and so loudly about themselves that they are forgetting to stop to consider their audience. What are they interested in? What do they want? What will they do as a result of this conversation?

It is easy to spot comms designed for consumers; it’s just that truly high impact work is often created with audiences – not consumers – in mind, and this has always been central to the industry.

Here are 10 ways to start entertaining and stop advertising.

1. Audience not consumer

Brands talk about consumers, the entertainment business talks about audiences. It’s an interesting distinction; it’s like we have forgotten that we are all people, not consumption machines.

What do you choose to read and watch? What would you spend 20mins on? What would you give an afternoon up for?

If we can create comms that start from this point, we will create work that people want to spend time with, share and talk about. Rather than things a brand wants to shout about.

2. Reference culture, not other ads

Brand comms, particularly advertising, is pretty self-referential. Comparing yourself to your competitive set is a false benchmark – how do you stack up against the rest of life? What will make me stop scrolling through Facebook? A bottle shot or the Buzzfeed listicle 20 Things Only Heirs to the Martian Thone Will Understand (top listicle)? To ‘do’ imagination rather than just ‘say’ it, we created the Imagination Series for Bombay Sapphire. A competition allowed people to imagine their film from our simple script.

Selected by the Tribeca Film Festival, the five winning ideas were produced as short films and screened at the festival. Room 8, a short film from this series, went on to win an entertainment award rather than an advertising one, and one of the highest accolades around, a BAFTA.

3. Create work that people want to share

It sounds obvious, but potential for ‘sharability’ is something often overlooked during the creative process. This doesn’t mean you write ‘We want a viral campaign’ on the brief, it means that you consider the psychology of sharing and integrate that into your development process. Our Sainsbury’s Christmas Jumpers spot was one of the most shared videos of 2014 gaining 28,000,000 views and being shared 600,000 times. Every aspect of the process from strategy and creative, to distribution and packaging were considered against sharing psychology.

4. Crave consistency

So many brands are slaves to the fickle rhythm of new advertising campaigns, producing expensive new creative assets and then throwing them in the bin. As alcohol brands engage their audiences directly, they have an opportunity to break this cycle, creating long-term formats that become familiar to audiences over time.

Shifting focus away from the advertising end line, brands that invest in beginning lines, or format titles, come out on top. This is a not new. Two French brothers in the tyre business wanted to engage a new, mobile middle class with increasing leisure time. The content refreshes, but the format has remained remarkably similar.

5. The value of partnership

A chance conversation with Jamie Oliver led to us hatching the successful Drinks Tube channel partnership for Bacardi Global. The deal was multi-faceted – more business partnership than just comms. It incorporated a YouTube and social channel and videos, magazine and online content, right through to personal appearances and new product development. These kinds of partnerships are becoming more commonplace, where parties come together, sharing resources for mutual benefit. Brands focusing these conversations on price often miss a trick and a powerful opportunity. If the right level of investment can be agreed, there is so much additional value to be gained through goodwill.

6. Talent: medium and message

With the rise of social media, talent is so important that it’s often the medium as well as the message in brand communications. When working with Cadbury, we brought James Corden on board – not only was he presenting the BRITS at the time, but he has a large social following which is an invaluable tool. The director, Ben Winston, was selected with 500k plus fans having directed the last 1D video. Never underestimate the power of social following, as they often give campaigns an additional boost.

7. Reflect internet culture

Fresh work often reflects the language and behaviours of the internet. This isn’t a manifesto to feature emojis in all work, rather an observation that some brand comms have kept up effectively with the rapid pace of change in internet culture. GIFS, cinemagraphs, BuzzFeed listicles and a whole plethora of new internet behaviours bubble up to define a moment. This Japanese recipe film would make no sense if not viewed through the lens of common internet behaviors such as stunts, humour and experiments.

8. Play with conventions

Reflecting internet culture is one thing, but the interesting things can happen when you start to lead this online culture, when you confront and disrupt. My favourite example of how this can be done occurred last year with Nazis against Nazis – Germany’s Most Involuntary Charity Walk. The title alone wins it for me.

9. Now you see it, now you don’t

The internet is increasingly visual. Engaging marketing should reflect the kinds of work that is delighting audiences. Always-on giving way to here-and-gone with the rise of platforms such as Snapchat and with it, a real opportunity for brands to have some fun.

10. Change the model

We’re approaching a really interesting crossroads in the media landscape. As many media owners see declining audiences, lots of brands are asking themselves whether this is the moment to go it alone.

Magazine and traditional media owners now deliver such modest audiences that the real brand value is more about their masthead endorsement. Brands can now build their own equity rather than paying and borrowing from others, with nothing to show for it at the end of the media spend. It’s something that Gravity Road spend a lot of time thinking about and developing with their client partners. And that’s when the real move from the confines of advertising begins.