Droga and I

1319935 — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:46:00 GMT

It’s hard when presenting in Stockholm not to throw in a few one-liners about suicides or Abba. “I’m so excited to be here I nearly killed myself", “You’re a great crowd, is it a Swedish convention not to clap?” “We’ve come a long way from Waterloo to get here” and so on. So it was good to see Dave Droga speaking at the Eurobest event last week without too many localisation jokes, but with dry wit and passion about the work he’s been up to. Dave likes only to work on things he feels passionate about and make a difference. There’s a superb campaign for Obama with Sarah Silverman getting Jewish grandparents in Florida to vote for change, and the Tap campaign in New York (getting people to pay for tap water as a charitable act). Creatives do love to work on things they feel passionate about, in fact, we all do. But it does leave the industry with a big question. How do you get passion for the brand from everyone involved in developing and delivering the communication?

Developing a different approach is one way. We talked at Eurobest about how developing a more modern approach to getting attention and engagement of specific target audiences with niche work can be highly effective. To be successful in Europe, cultural insight and relevance is critical. Others showed ideas living well in several channels. Others showed work that was just ‘cool’. And that’s ok. Because if it’s cool, and consumers feel differently as a result of seeing or engaging with the message and the experience of what the brand stands for, it does rather a lot of good for the brand.

Not discussed so much, but underpinning the mood of the whole event, is the tough question about the budgets out there. Not many marketers are expecting to spend more, and are expecting robust business cases behind activity. As Shakespeare put it, ‘twas ever thus. The difference now, though, is that if we can’t put numbers in front of work, it won’t fly. But sometimes we need to understand the context of emotional decision-making and passion for brands, which don’t necessarily follow the logic of numbers. It got me thinking about what people feel strong ‘emotional connections’ with.

Let’s imagine we’re pitching for an insurer called Manchester United. The data shows us that there are 2 million homeowners in London who buy their insurance from another firm called Chelsea. The marketing task is simple. Let’s get 5% of the Chelsea policy-holders to switch to Manchester United and we'll hit our target. But for reasons that nobody can quite explain, the Chelsea loyalists ('fans' in Facebook parlance) don’t want to switch. In fact they send mailers back, deface the posters on the Cromwell Road, hack the site and stand up saying “we hate Man U” in the pub. Of course it takes time, heritage, high levels of engagement and product performance to get to the place Manchester United and Chelsea hold amongst their strongest fans. And I choose these teams as (arguably) they have a higher proportion of fair-weather fans (prospective switchers) compared to say, Liverpool, or Luton Town. Not all brands have the same investment capacity. But every brand should have something inspiring to say if you think hard enough.

www.eurobest.com

http://mingeltv.eurobest.com/videos/details/48

http://mingeltv.eurobest.com/videos/details/45

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Droga and I