How creativity is changing in a mobile first-era and why it matters to marketers
At a D&AD Festival fringe event hosted by Facebook, jury members discussed how creative is having to change to meet the demand of mobile devices and consumer behaviour – and what marketers need to understand to create effective advertising.
The relationship between marketers and creatives always requires a mix of compromise and collaboration. Marketers are ultimately driven by commercial imperatives and creatives by the desire to create great work that stands out.
The best marketing and advertising, obviously, achieves both goals – indeed, great creative achieves commercial results for brands by increasing consumers’ awareness, consideration and intent to purchase.
But mobile is changing the nature of creativity substantially, with the formats and techniques involved in creative executions changing day by day, as well as the behaviour of the consumers interacting with them. Marketers can’t afford to let these developments pass them by if they are to understand how to make an impact with a creative that achieves business objectives.
“Mobile wise, there are two things; the device and the behaviour that comes with it,” said Jose Cabaco, global concepts and storytelling creative director at Adidas, speaking at a D&AD Festival fringe event this week, hosted by Facebook. Cabaco, who is a member of the branded content jury for the festival, says these two factors must govern “the platforms that you choose to be the output of your story”, and they will have inevitable implications for the business results.
Where the device is concerned, the most obvious upshot of mobile is the move to a portrait screen, while the biggest consequences of consumer behaviour in this channel are on the speed with which the message must be communicated.
Facebook’s head of Creative Shop for Northern Europe, Valentina Culatti, pointed to the findings of a recent report by the Mobile Marketing Association: “When exposed to an ad on mobile, a consumer can trigger a cognitive process in less than the blink of an eye. When you make a decision as a consumer, on mobile you can trigger a positive or negative opinion on a piece of creative in less than half a second.”
This prompted Facebook to do its own research into how consumers interact with different kinds of stories and messages, she added. “We noticed that non-linear narrative pieces were performing better from a brand-building perspective, because they had higher visibility, message comprehension and brand association as well as video views -so longer view duration, a higher number of views and higher interaction rates.”
According to Adam Kerj, chief creative officer for the Nordic region at Accenture Interactive and a member of the D&AD digital marketing jury, the need to respond to this shift in attention is critical for a number of brands. “It seems that the attention economy has peaked. We only have 24 hours in a day,” he said.
“Let’s say you’re Netflix and your number one KPI is screen time, and the consumer is playing the online game Fortnite; how do you get people to leave that platform, that they love more than anything? Really meaningful, interesting ideas have to capture the audience to make them immerse themselves, because there are so many brands and there is only so much we can do in 24 hours.
“We’re living such busy lives that if you really want to break through with an idea, you really have to understand the context of where you are communicating that idea, so you have to be really platform-specific.”
Kerj names Diesel as a brand doing a good job of inserting itself into key consumer conversations on mobile. Another brand that recently took such a platform-specific approach to a mobile campaign was Tommy Hilfiger. It wanted to make its catwalk shows more accessible to a generation Z audience, so it created a mobile video experience using Facebook Messenger’s SideFlix function that emulated the experience of shopping with friends.
Consumers were able to invite friends via Messenger to watch video content related to new clothing collections and fashion shows on their mobiles. Placing their screens alongside each other expanded the content that was viewable – stretching across up to four different screens, with all the videos being shoppable.
In three weeks, 21,000 unique visitors shopped for Tommy Hilfiger in SideFlix, accessing content created around fashion shows in New York, Shanghai and Tokyo. For every additional person who joined the group experience, the amount of time spent on it doubled.
To achieve the best possible creative and commercial results from mobile-first content, clients and agencies clearly need to work in a way that recognises the new realities of mobile behaviour and content consumption.
According to Carmela Soares, executive creative director at Clemenger BBDO and a D&AD digital marketing jury member: “Collaboration is the key word here. At the moment it feels a bit strained between agencies and clients. There is a lot of negotiation.”
She thinks marketers and creatives need to “really listen to each other” and that bringing “a client and agency together to co-create is probably a good way to go to get a better result”.
Adidas’s Cabaco argued that the brand’s brief needs to involve bigger creative teams at the outset, in order to produce content that makes the most of mobile and achieve business results.
“We’re at the point where togetherness will make so much more progress in disrupting the format of how we communicate. It is not ideal if we are left to the very old relationship between agency and client, and then production being commissioned to execute something where they were not a part of the conversation.” He added: “The bigger the team, the bigger the ability to let go of your ownership and be OK to collectively shift industry behaviour.”
As Facebook’s group head of creative agency partnerships KJ Weir noted, getting creative right in mobile will be rewarded, not least with a lower campaign costs, because consumers are more likely to engage when creative is optimised for mobile.
Source: Marketing Week
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Comment
No comments found.