Category Archives: creative

advertising, campaigns, challenges, creative, insight

On The Edge Of Glory

2022 has been a bit of a personal creative renaissance.

After a couple of years that were decent, but not exactly breakthrough, I felt like I was finally leading the kind of work I’d always aspired to. Work that landed strong business results, caught fire on social media, was discussed by the industry and managed to bag us a bunch of awards too.

This didn’t happen by chance. Looking back, I can pinpoint the moments in time where I was introduced to new ideas that helped shape our thinking. And led to work we’re immensely proud of: #SearchForChange, #YukBukaSuara, #IndiaKiUdaan, #KeepTraditionsAlive (Eid, Diwali, Raksha Bandhan), and more.

Discovering, absorbing and acting on the ideas I’ve learned from Les Binet, Peter Field, Orlando Wood, Byron Sharp and Jonah Berger has turned me into a student of creativity and marketing effectiveness.

And if there’s one thing I’m dead certain of, it is that marketing stands at the precipice of a creative renaissance: we can either choose to step back and continue down a path of average-ness, or step off the cliff into the bold, glorious unknown.

LinkedIn is full of people summarising what they’ve learned from this new group of marketing thinkers. So I thought I’d give it a shot, and share how I’ve synthesised their work into a method that has worked for me. Any errors in understanding their work are mine alone, and I welcome your critiques and builds.

Here’s my buck; now where’s my bang?

Messrs. Wood, Binet, Field and Sharp have shown, with evidence, that long-term campaign effectiveness has declined as Extra Share Of Voice (Share Of Voice minus Share Of Market) has declined. While award-winning campaigns continue to be more effective than the also-rans, the effectiveness of these campaigns too are on the decline, suggesting a fundamental shift – in the wrong direction – in advertising principles altogether.

Made you look?

The root cause of this decline is what the group calls The Triple Jeopardy of Attention.

As budgets have moved from brand to performance, with a focus on short-term effects at a large scale, the mental availability of brands (salience) has declined.

It doesn’t help that marketers still mistakenly believe that one impression on platform A has the same value on Platform B, whereas different platforms generate different kinds of attention. For example, Linear TV is becoming less and less relevant while Social continues to rise, with users turning to influencers and friends for trusted, credible recommendations and content. An impression on Social thus might have more value than one on linear TV.

Finally, ads themselves have changed in the performance marketing era, to narrow-focus, chopped narratives. While they’re designed to quickly land the brand message with people who aren’t paying attention, they aren’t designed to drive any attention in the first place: making this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Relationship Status: It’s Complicated

The times, they are a-changin’.

The world is in polycrisis, heaving from one issue to another.

Two years of the pandemic have forever transformed society and the way we consider living our lives, fuelling meaningful conversations about gender and racial equity.

Economic recovery has been short-lived, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dealing a blow to the global economy.

Misinformation is proliferating, and the new media cycle about AI has sparked more questions than answers.

And then, of course, the threat of drastic climate change looms large.

In this age, multiple studies suggest that brands that demonstrate a strong understanding of lived realities, focus on inclusion and representation and address real problems are likely to win.

I’ve drawn some conclusions based on what I see with the work we do.

A simple, contextual and insightful text tweet promoting a feature is likely to get way more attention, and spark more engagement and conversations about the feature than a 30-second ad film about the same feature.

Ad films rooted deeply in lived realities and local culture are more likely to drive earned media and become part of the conversation than traditional slice-of-life storytelling-driven ads; the latter seem to need a higher paid media spend to drive business impact.

All of which just goes to show that traditional advertising is more likely to be ignored; unless a consumer simply can’t escape seeing it.

For FFF’s Sake!

Binet and Field’s seminal work, The Long And Short Of It, proves two points in particular.

One: Emotional campaigns are more effective across almost all business metrics – and are able to get more attention than rational campaigns.

Two: Fame-driving campaigns in particular (defined as those that build word-of-mouth advocacy for the brand, get talked about, create authority for the brand, and give the sense that the brand is doing the most running in the category) outperform all other kinds of emotional campaigns on all business metrics.

Simply put, campaigns that are built to get attention do better than those that aren’t.

Binet, Field and Wood found the following common threads between those attention-grabbing campaigns.

Firstly, they drive Fame, or salience, building long-term memory structures to bring the brand to mind.
Secondly, they generate Feeling, an emotional connection that orientates our attention and puts things in long-term memory to make one choice more obvious than others.
And thirdly, they have high Fluency, and are highly distinctive from other campaigns.

Instinctively, the FFF framework feels right: the more shareworthy, insightful and distinctive the work, the better the results.

Take your first STEPPS

Late in 2021, I rediscovered a framework to help me put FFF into action. Courtesy Jonah Berger, and the Viral Sprint he hosts for Section, Scott Galloway’s online education outfit.

Prof. Berger shows that brands which have scaled rapidly have done so by focusing not just on sales results, but brand results. The tl;dr is: campaigns that are designed to drive Adoption+Advocacy drive greater business impact than campaigns designed to just drive Adoption.

It’s called STEPPS, and is designed to inject talkworthiness/memorability/attention-grabbingness (my submission for the Oxford Dictionary’s Word Of The Year) into your campaigns. Turning what could be a potentially average campaign into something that drives both Adoption and Advocacy.

The acid test

The first campaigns we implemented these frameworks on were for our 2022 International Women’s Day campaigns, in both India and Indonesia. The resulting work, and the impact it drove, changed my thinking forever. Both campaigns generated way higher volumes of social conversation and press coverage than we’d anticipated, while landing strong business results. The India campaign has become Google India’s most-awarded campaign in recent years.

We fast-followed with the India@75 campaign, #IndiaKiUdaan. And ended up being talked about more than even the government’s own efforts to celebrate the moment!

Since then, STEPPS and FFF have become the muses of my personal creative renaissance. And helped me redefine and reinvent how I want to approach my work for the next several years.

#TIL Forever

The journey isn’t over yet. There’s more to read and learn from Binet, Field, Wood, Sharp, Berger and others. I’ve yet to dive deep into Mark Ritson’s work – I keep seeing pieces of it on LinkedIn that excite and energise me.

In the meanwhile, if you’re looking for further reading, here are my sources:

  • The Long And Short Of It, by Les Binet and Peter Field
  • Lemon – How The Advertising Dream Turned Sour, by Orlando Wood
  • Contagious, by Jonah Berger

I’ll leave you with one last thought:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Rita Mae Brown

It’s time to jump off that cliff.

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careers, clients, creative, insight

How I Moved From Creative To Client-Side, With Google…#truestory!

what-i-do-at-google

“Good! Good!! I can feel your interest!!!”

In the nearly three years since I joined Google India, I’ve lost track of the number of times people have asked me what I do.

(And no, the designation doesn’t seem to help.)

I’ve also been asked, several times, about what it’s like for a creative director to move to the client side in a brand role.

And that’s why I thought it was time for a blog post to answer these questions and satisfy the world’s curiosity. And, as is my wont, to offer $0.02 worth of gyaan that may help you if you’re contemplating a similar decision.

(At this point, I suggest you step out for a bio-break, or a cup of coffee. This is going to be a #longread.)

“How did you get into Google?”

My journey to this point began more than two years before I actually joined Google. When I was working as Creative Head at Jack In The Box Worldwide, back in 2011.

I’ve been (and remain) a longtime Google and Android fan. I was among those who wept when Google Reader was shuttered; among those who found a reason to use Google Wave and other awesome Google services; and a very vocal advocate of Android.

I also followed Google’s creative work closely. Especially the awesome interactive experiences that the folks at Google Creative Lab built – cultural experiences built atop products, which made me fall in love with the brand all over again.

One night in bed, faffing on my laptop, I started chatting with my wife about how Google would be the one client I would kill to join. And about how perhaps they could use an agency Creative Director to help build great integrated marketing campaigns for the India market. On a lark, we navigated over to google.com/jobs – and was blown away to find that there was an opening for a similar role in Singapore.

With complete excitement, I swiftly polished up my CV and uploaded it to the job listing, said a prayer and called it a night.

And completely forgot about it for the next two years.

Cut to November 2013. I’m prowling the halls of a Delhi hospital, nursing my father-in-law. And an email from a Google recruiter pops up in my inbox. It seemed they had a role open in India, and my CV had come up in their database.

My first phone call, purely for screening, happened the next day from the hospital. I was then connected with a recruiter for a more serious conversation – the ball was rolling.

Nine interviews later – nine gruelling, thought-provoking and absolutely amazing conversations later – I bid adieu to home, Bombay. And the wife and I winged our way to Gurgaon, where we’ve been ever since.

“So what exactly do you do there?”

The role I was hired to play was a new one altogether for Google. So, I don’t hesitate to admit that it took me – and my colleagues – quite some time to figure out how to make it work. I walked in expecting to work like an in-house Creative Director. With the kind of responsibilities that an agency Creative Director bears. But I was mistaken. My designation – Brand Lead – pushes the in-house Creative Director envelope quite a bit further. And goes beyond a traditional brand marketing role, too.

I head up Brand & Creative Marketing for Google India, and am hence responsible for any and all creative work for Google India. This includes, primarily, our marketing campaigns. It’s my job to work with Product Marketing Managers to tell great stories for our products and initiatives, across every medium possible. TV ads, YouTube videos, digital, social, traditional media…you name it.

Apart from being as creatively strong as possible, it’s on me to make sure that the work we do is “on-brand”. That it reflects Google’s core values; that it looks, feels and sounds Google; and that it accurately reflects our brand mission of helping make information universally accessible and useful.

I lead the thinking on our social media strategy. I lead our creative agency relationships, identifying great partners to work with and managing them end-to-end. And, lastly, I look after a bunch of special projects that fall under Brand Marketing.

A lot of this sounds like a regular Creative Director job, I know. But here’s the difference:

I haven’t been hired to write the scripts, or craft the copy. That’s the job of our agencies. My job, as I see it, is to set the parameters, create the sandbox, in which our agencies can play. To be a bridge between us and them, thus guiding and shaping the work in a fluid, fast-moving environment. And, if ever needed, to put on my copywriter hat and work side-by-side with them.

There are several aspects to this. One: I work very closely on the brief. Making sure it’s clear, contextual, single-minded and inspiring. Trying to foresee the kind of work it will lead to. Two: I bring our different agencies (brand, digital, social) together to build a campaign that’s not just 360°, but truly integrated. Three: I work to make sure our brand and products are being depicted correctly. Four: At the risk of sounding immodest, I try to keep the benchmark high, pushing our agencies to consistently deliver work that’s truly worthy of Google.

The big difference that a creative person can make inside a client org is to bring creative agency knowledge into a client institution. It means that, as a team, we now have a better understanding of how a particular brief or feedback will impact the end product, with lesser room for miscommunication and misunderstanding. This leads us to sharpen our briefs, consolidate and hone our feedback, leading to better work, with fewer iterations.

I’d like to think I’ve also helped ensure that we’ve avoided the “agency v/s client” mindset that occasionally creeps into client minds, by being a bridge to and supporter of our agencies.

“Sounds great. What does it take to succeed at the role?”

Every person who takes on this kind of role is going to tackle it differently. I don’t believe one size fits all, but this is how I tried to make it work for me.

Your first priority should be to understand the organisation. Ad agency structures are pretty simple, and one always knows who one’s stakeholders are. It’s a lot more complicated at a client, especially one with the scale of Google.

Leadership isn’t about dictating a way forward; it’s about taking everyone forward together. Be a team player. Try to take your peers along. Most marketing managers don’t have the inside knowledge on how agencies and advertising work that you do. Few have been to a shoot. Few have built large-scale campaigns. Make them your friends and allies. Take the time to explain your point of view. Consult them for input on the work you’re doing, and take feedback constructively, making sure everyone’s on the same page from the start. It isn’t always easy, but I’ve learned that it will save me time, money and heartache on every single project.

Great work depends humongously on the people doing it. One of the things I’m grateful for is having great partners to work with. They’re worth their weight in gold. The best agencies bring a great mix of humility and self-confidence to the relationship, are open to feedback, and willing to fight to see a good idea come to life. They learn from their mistakes, and are committed to helping you learn from yours. They’re keen for me and my team to learn and contribute more to the advertising process. And, most importantly, they’re not assholes.

The converse of this is that you need to really support your agencies. Be honest and transparent. Don’t shy away from glowing praise or constructive criticism. Stand up for them when I know they have a great idea, no matter what the opposition. Help them navigate the organisation. Don’t conduct business just over email and the phone. And pay them fairly – it’s the only way they’ll be able to give you the work that you want. 

Expect to stretch yourself in ways that you never have. On my first project, I handled everything, including deliveries to media. I negotiate with agencies, and draft their contracts. Not quite what an agency creative director is used to, but par for the course on the client-side.

The most important thing, though, is this: let go of your ego. Every creative person worth their salt has an ego, probably well-deserved. You have to realise that you’re surrounded by smart people who know their business better than you. And that you’re working with agencies (and creative icons) that collectively have far more wisdom than you alone. Be open-minded. Walk into office every day believing that there is someone else out there who can bring a new perspective and make your work better. It’ll help you get the best out of your agencies, and keep you from competing with them.

“Do you think I should also shift client-side?”

There isn’t a black-and-white answer to this. And there are several things to consider, notably the difference between working in an agency and on the client-side.

The first thing most people ask me is about the work-life balance. Truthfully, even though we work really hard, it’s been better for me than in my agency days. Even a 9-5 day is intense, simply because we go without the Counter-Strike breaks that agency folks take – and need to, frankly! That changes when we’re neck-deep in a launch, when my team and I work the same long hours as our agencies.

I’ve also been asked if I miss coming up with ideas and writing scripts. Well, I’m still coming up with ideas. All the time. It just happens before the brief, rather than after. I begin most projects with a mindmap full of cross-platform ideas, which we then build upon together. And I have occasionally put on my creative hat to help our agencies crack an idea or craft a script, so I do stay in touch with the trade I’ve learnt over the last 16 years.

The one slight doubt I had, which has disappeared over time, is this. Most agency creatives enjoy working on a variety of categories and brands, rather than just one. I did too. You learn a lot more than you would working on one category. And can implement successful ideas from one category for another too. You won’t get this freedom if you move client side. But, if you work for a company with as varied products and initiatives as Google, you do have a wide variety of things to work on.

Doubts and questions aside, I think you should just ask yourself one thing.

If there is a brand that you’re truly passionate about; whose purpose you truly believe in; whose products you’d publicly defend to the death; for whom you’ve secretly been coming up with portfolio ads; you may have found the client-side gig you’re looking for.

I know I’ve found mine.

As always, the views expressed here are personal and not intended to reflect those of my employer.

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content, creative, industry

Creativity In Content Marketing

I was recently invited by DMAi to speak at Global Marketing & Advertising Week (#GMAW15), on creativity in content marketing. Below is an adapted version of that speech.

A few years ago, when I was working at one of India’s most well-known content marketing agencies, life was very different.

Back then we really struggled to sell the idea of content marketing to clients. The idea of engaging audiences all-year-round with words, pictures and videos, with metrics that were tough to define, was always a struggle to sell.

We failed more often than we succeeded. But we succeeded just often enough to help bring content marketing into mainstream conversation.

We’ve come a long way since then, I think. We’re all working hard to come up with content to engage audiences in a connected world. To ensure that we look at all our communication through a content lens. To make it part and parcel of our marketing communication DNA.

We now have a few years’ experience behind us; we’re learning through trial-and-error and experiments that often fail; we’re learning from markets that are ahead of us; we’re getting better at this game.

So what do today and tomorrow hold for us?

A couple of years ago, I’d begin every brief by sitting down with my pen and scribble pad and saying, “Right. Let’s lead with with a blog post. That means I’ll need some social media posts to get people to it. Ooh, a hashtag would be nice, let’s do one of those too! #IsThisHashtagTooLong”

On my worst days, I’d even write down “run a contest” on that sheet of paper.

I could then walk away feeling pretty satisfied, pretty nice about myself. Time for a coffee break.

But today, when I’d look at that sheet of ideas the night before a presentation, I’d start sweating.

Because all of these have become hygiene. Because having a blog, or creating a hashtag, or running a contest, isn’t a content marketing idea. It’s become a format, another box you just tick.

Today, brands like yours are churning out this kind of content day in and day out. The Internet is flooded with it. As are my social media feeds. We’re already churning out content calendars and figuring out how to spark brand conversations during the Cricket World Cup.

It’s come to a point where each brand sounds absolutely no different from the next…and I can’t tell which is which just by looking at the content. Which, as you’d all know, is really not a good thing.

And so I ask myself, “In this sea of infinite content, where on any normal day of the week, 8 of the top 10 trending hashtags are brand conversations, where each headline is more click-baity than the next, what the hell is going to make my brand and my content really stand out?”

I’ve always believed that content is the ‘pull’ of marketing communications, rather than the ‘push’.

I believe that good content gets people coming back because it entertains, it inspires, it touches an emotional chord, it makes them rant and rage. Or it simply provides a utility or gives them information or education that they weren’t getting before.

Good content is also immensely shareable – because of the reasons I mentioned just now.

One huge, and often ignored, role of content is to generate positive earned media for the brand. There are huge synergies emerging between content marketing and PR, not just in terms of story dissemination but also in terms of story packaging.

I also believe that one can’t restrict content to words, pictures and videos that just wash over people sitting in front of a screen. Interactivity is key. And technology is the answer to immersing audiences deeper into a brand. Apps, games, platforms, devices – they all have a role to play in creating great content.

So, with all those filters in my head, I go back to “How do I stand out?”

The answer I’ve got to over the years is this:

Actions speak louder than words.

It’s a simple human truth, right?

We judge people – our friends, our leaders, our doctors, our wedding photographers – by that yardstick. By what they do, not what they say.

It’s the same for brands.

In a parity environment, what a brand does matters more than what it claims to do.

So, at this point in my life and career, I look at it this way:

Advertising is what you say.
Content is what you do.

Now, what do you mean by ‘do’?

I could, as a content marketer, ‘do’ a video. I could ‘do’ a blog post. I could ‘do’ an influencer engagement or ‘do’ a tweetup.

But that’s not what I mean. That’s just playing with words, right?

To me, ‘doing’ means refocusing on your core brand promise, and then living up to it in front of your audience. In whatever manner works best.

It means proving, every day, that you’re true to your words and promise. That you mean what you say.

It means focusing less on changing perceptions by making a claim; and more on changing perceptions by fulfilling or exceeding expectations.

It means being less of an interruption in people’s lives; it means positively impacting people’s lives through your products, services and brand.

One way brands can stand out in a cluttered, parity environment is to create content that proves – honestly, credibly and creatively – what they stand for. And thus start owning that space.

Across any screen you can think of.

Let me show you a piece of work from one of my favourite content marketing campaigns. Chrome Experiments were begun to push the limits of Web technology, to push the limits of Google’s Chrome Browser. And, to noticeably demonstrate how good the Chrome browser is.

The Chrome team didn’t just talk about being faster, or having more features, or being more developer-friendly. They just kept creating pieces of content that proved it. Over and over and over again. And today, many Chrome Experiments are being created every day by developers all over the world, who are not Googlers. Just people pushing the limits of what the technology can do.

One of my favourite content marketing brands in the world is Red Bull. Everyone knows that they stand for giving wings to athletes. But they don’t just support these athletes morally, or emotionally or financially. They create platforms for them to shine. They identify athletes, work with them and then co-create content that makes those athletes world-famous.

It’s easy for a food industry brand to stick to the conventional food industry metaphors. Blendtec has always been different. They have a core brand promise; they stick to it; and then they deliver on it in the most amazing, culturally-contextual ways possible.

India’s favourite beer is known for their baseline – The King of Good Times. Kingfisher have embraced technology to create content and experiences that offer a memorable good time to their fans.

It isn’t just B2C marketing that can benefit from this kind of an approach. Every year, around Christmas, the Publicis Groupe create a Christmas card that they put up online. Last year’s card was an interactive experiment designed to entertain – and also to subtly prove Publicis’ strengths in creative digital marketing.

I’ll end with a story that’s very close to my heart. Everybody’s talking about the great Indian e-commerce boom. Billion-dollar valuations, transactions-per-day, the payment ecosystem and an ever-increasing user base. Nobody – I repeat, nobody – was talking about the wheels that make this economy turn. Last year, during GOSF, we decided that we should do something special for people nobody cared about. To get them into the conversation and recognise their efforts. Because we believe that the web exists to improve the lives of all people.

So, the next time you brief your agency on a content marketing campaign, don’t ask them what you can say.

Ask them what you can do.

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