Page 88 - The EDIT | Q2 2017

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Ideas
creatives whilst staying cost effective. Eventually, we worked up a ranking system for trending topics (to inform our targeting and creative production teams), enabling us to create the Street’s News Team Summer News Reports.
Why do you think this idea was REALLY good?
Everyone wants to be contextual, everyone wants to be relevant. We know this has a range of positive effects on brands, but often the result is a light version of these characteristics.
What makes this idea special is it is a true step in the direction of intelligent advertising adaption. We knew what would trend,
we knew how to segregate this inventory, and together with help from our creative partners, we successfully brought humor to news stories and topics that consumers were all talking about at the time.
What was the driving insight behind the idea?
We had an initial core insight about our category: Streets
Ice Cream was competing
in a market that is driven by innovation. New products are how ice cream brands keep
sales churning. People love it — something new and a bit trendy is very tempting.
This sparked a bigger, albeit not as profound insight; people are attracted to, and love to consume news. News grabs consumers’ attention, especially when they have a passion for the topic at hand. On the flip side, however,
consumers move on just as quickly as the news comes about.
While Streets didn’t have anything new to talk about per
se, we could still become part
of the news conversation by being hyper-relevant and hyper- humorous. We had to poke,
prod and make fun of news,
as it happened, and before its relevance died off. We put Street’s at the forefront of news stories
as they were breaking across YouTube, stealing some of the shine for ourselves in the process.
Looking back, what was the key moment in developing the idea – why was it so crucial?
Deciphering how we used data to inform our news bulletins was without a doubt the most crucial element of the campaign, and to a further extent, how we targeted the campaign so efficiently.
During the campaign, a host of meetings, in addition to numerous days spent trawling data to develop a method to rank topics, video inventory and later ad performance kept us busy. All
the hard work was not for nil, however. Post-campaign, Google decided to start developing a tool to replicate the work we did locally at PHD Australia.
What do you do to stimulate your own personal creativity?
Personally, I love finding solutions to systematic problems, but far too often you find yourself solving the same sort of challenges, which are all controlled by the same foreseen issues. To be
truly creative, and in doing so, innovative, you need to remove your bias around foreseen issues.
To get around this, we have a hard rule at PHD Australia, which entails leaving your bias at the door when brainstorming, thus ensuring the generation
of creative, innovative and left field ideas.
What this entails is allowing yourself to initially forget whether the client has never done something like this, or whether you think it cost too much. Even extensive ideas that require hundreds of creative or unthinkable targeting angles can be done effectively if you give yourself the time to find the solution.
What advice would you give to PHDers looking to enter an upcoming Light Awards?
My biggest piece of advice is
to simply make sure you enter and give yourself sufficient time for the entry. Beyond this, when you think you are working on a cracker of a campaign, collect assets along the way. Also give yourself a few weeks to write and tweak your entry. If your mum can understand your entry, you know you are nearly there. Finally, I would say that one should never doubt their work, you will be surprised how well an entry can come together when you realise the story you are trying to tell.
Ben Lynch PHD Australia
THE EDIT ISSUE 06 | Q2 2017