A whirlwind of storytelling, best practice social, robots in advertising and using comedy creatively. OLIVER Art Director, Lucy Kaitcer shares her takeaways from spending three days at the D&AD festival.

Last week I got the opportunity to go to the D&AD festival, the first of its kind. It was three days of intense workshops, speakers and interesting talks. It was so worth the experience, to feel inspired, educated and left wanting to find out more in this crazy advertising world we live and breathe.

STORYTELLING

Storytelling undoubtedly has an important role in advertising. It’s all about human truths we can all relate to, lessening the distance between the audience and the characters.

In every successful advertising story there are one of four plots:

• Monster – e.g. run like a girl / this girl can
• Tragedy – e.g. ant drink driving / government health comms
• Comedy – e.g. beer advertising
• Quest – e.g. Lynx

In today’s world, it’s all about storytelling rather than messaging, and that’s what makes a good advert stand apart. We look for emotional value that our heart can relate to, which is why we prefer adverts using storytelling rather than logic and messaging.

Three things are intrinsic to all stories:

1. I wish that was me
2. A moment where you can relate and identify with the story – ‘it’s me’
3. A realisation where you think ‘thank goodness that’s not me!’

IDEAS, IDEAS, IDEAS

Another memorable talk I went to was by Nick Eagleton, a CD at The Partners. After receiving a brief (which should be short like the name specifies), he stressed the importance of explaining what you’re advertising in one line, so it can turn into some emotional story. What’s behind it? Why is that great? Where should we take it?

He mentioned different techniques for producing ideas, inspired by James Web Young:

1. Gather and explore the brief.
2. Think about it – generate ideas. Keep going until you don’t know where to go and get stuck (it’s part of the process which is a good thing!)
3. Forget about it for a while, walk away from it, but do other things which will feed your mind with inspiration which can actually help your thinking when you go back to it again.
4. A clue or glimpse of something which may become a great IDEA. Trust your inner voices.
5. Craft – bringing your idea to life by making it real visually.

Once you’ve got your idea, simplify it. Turn the negative into a positive, do something silly with it or build on something that already exists.

A great example he showed us was a brief he got from the National Gallery to reconnect people to the paintings. Rather than bringing people into the gallery, they brought the paintings to the people.

MARTIN SORRELL

Martin Sorrell’s talk was aimed at the entrepreneurs at the festival, rather than the creatives. His main point was that to succeed, it’s necessary to find an industry that you love and which emotionally stimulates you. The key is to have persistence. He said that to be successful in advertising, you have to be an optimist.

ROBOTS IN ADVERTISING

Will a robot ever be able to win a white pencil? Will a robot ever be able to understand art and music? Can a robot be imaginative? The panel discussed how there will always need to be a human touch. However, underlying intelligence may be able to learn once released into the world, and may overtime develop consciousness.

So, what does this mean for advertising agencies? Infinite possibilities. Robots may be able to help us hack culture, as they can see things more logically. If given a problem to solve, they could have a logical answer, which could either have amazing results or go the other way. A lot of human thinking is political so it becomes diluted. Robots could eradicate that with logic, which could potentially end war. With regards to a robot winning a white pencil, the panel came to the conclusion that you have to be in tune with injustice and suffering in the world, so it was a no for now.

TWITTER

Next, I went to hear how to be creative on social media, predominantly Twitter. It’s all about using a tone of voice and personality that engages people and gets everyone excited.

Topical and reactive content works well on social, however speed is important to get the tweet out early, at a point where the story is just breaking. Although many brands are talking about topical content on Twitter, it should always relate back to the brand to give it more significance. Enter the conversation but put the brand’s spin on it. For examples, Snickers use of ‘you’re not you when you’re hungry’ in the case of Jeremy Clarkson.

Another example is Nando’s tweet when announcing the Elizabeth line.

Why the #ElizabethLine is the greatest line of all time… pic.twitter.com/EPojI3Tyr9

— Nando's (@NandosUK) February 23, 2016

 

Brands only have a few seconds to get their point across, so always be relevant but link back to the brand.

It’s been discovered that the shorter the tweet, the more engagement people have with it. Even 140 characters is one too many characters nowadays. It’s also important to keep a theme going with the brand’s tweets, so that people keep coming back to that particular Twitter account for that one thing.

They moved on to talk about being creative with Twitter as a medium. Brands only have a few seconds to jump out through people’s timelines. The speaker mentioned ways to cut through the noise by using Twitter creatively. Using images is one way to make a tweet visually interesting.

 

Another way is to be very clever with a strong idea that can really catch fire on social. For National Blood Week, they needed people to donate A, O and B blood types, so they came up with a Twitter campaign with those missing letters to get attention.

Lastly, storytelling can get people’s attention on Twitter. An example is a Twitter account of how JFK spent his last 50 days of his life, which was re-enacted through tweets day by day. History was brought to everyone’s timeline as if it was JFK tweeting today. This account gained thousands of followers as a result and sparked huge engagement.

Motorcade to the Trade Mart in Dallas with Mrs. Kennedy, Governor Connally, Mrs. Connally and Vice President Johnson pic.twitter.com/mPi7lwdS2k

— JFKsaid (@JFKsaid) November 22, 2013

 

It’s not just about how to speak to people on Twitter, but also how to converse with to people that may have a huge impact. Sometimes it’s about taking those risks to get huge results. For example, Argos’ response below.

COMEDY

Last but not least, I went to hear Sam Pond speak. He’s a comedian who has worked in advertising most of his life. He spoke about comedy and how it’s not funny, but the character that’s funny. Our response to people is where the comedy lies.

We all know people who annoy us and we don’t find those people funny, but it’s the distance that makes it funny – by taking it out of context. For example, we all know someone who says sorry in every sentence, or someone who always talks about themselves or someone who doesn’t answer the question you’ve asked. We would never say those people are comical. However, those actions in a different situation become comical because we can all relate to them. It’s the judgment of those people that annoy us that gets in the way of the process.

Funny is entirely subjective and laughter is entirely involuntary. Laughter comes from everyday interaction and we can’t control it, especially if we don’t know what starts it. Comedy on the other hand, is the truth about what it’s like to be human. It’s not knowing and then knowing. It’s all about hopefulness – it’s psychosis in action that produces comedy; solving a problem without knowing the principle and hope that whatever they are doing will succeed.

He mentioned 5 things which contribute to comedy:

1. Blind – not knowing reality
2. Arrogant – their way is best
3. Industrious – never giving up
4. Optimistic – hopefulness
5. Helplessness – when a person with 1-4 attributes meets someone who’s even more of the above. An example of industrious is this car insurance advert:

 

So, what do we do? It’s not about likability. It’s about finding a character that loves or hates the product for totally the wrong reasons. We invent characters, but characters can invent themselves. Advertising is an uninvited guest into people’s homes, so it owes entertainment, and through comedy we can celebrate people’s flaws and promote what it’s like to be human.

As you can see (if you’ve read this far), I’ve learnt so much over those 3 days, which will stick with me for way more than 3 days! I think the most important thing that was reiterated again and again was about looking at things in a different way. Indifference is meaningless, safe and bland. Someone said the phrase ‘VUJA DE’- (opposite of Déjà vu), which is all about looking at things we are familiar with in a different way. I’m going to end on this last example to re-emphasise this point:

 

I hope you’ve benefited from what I found extremely useful.