IT still boils down to delivering an effective campaign within budget.
Rory Gallery, Chief Strategy Officer of Special New Zealand, an independent marketing agency, is realistic about what the client and consumer wants from an advertisement.
“It’s actually just about being really smart with the money that you have. Knowing that consumers probably don’t pay too much attention to what you have to say.
“That’s the start point for pretty much every brief that should be on every single brief at the top.”
Special Lessons
One of the invited speakers to the recent Effie Awards Singapore, Rory detailed campaign designs for a NZ-based insurance company and local bank, with his work exemplary of many of the judges desired features.
Rory and Special New Zealand helped life insurance company Partners Life increase sales to chronically underinsured NZ citizens, in their decorated ad campaign ‘Last Performance’, in which the deceased characters from popular TV show The Brokenwood Mysteries come back to life to lament on the implications of their lack of life insurance.
The genre was chosen as a way to incorporate the message in a minimally invasive yet impactful way, and involved the team pitching the idea to film studios and ultimately the show’s creators, explaining how they could seamlessly blend their campaign with the show’s filming.
Their campaign reached 59% of New Zealanders, and due to the show’s international audience, also gained recognition abroad. In addition, appetite for life insurance rose 12%.
Brave New Words
Many viewed the strategy adopted by Special New Zealand as brave, and boundary pushing. Rory feels these are terms that are over used.
“My pet peeve right now is this idea of ‘bravery’. I feel doing that isn’t being brave, it’s just doing the sensible right thing that gets spoken about and does a great job for a brand.
Most of our clients are definitely pushing the boundaries. But I think what we should be talking about are objectives and budgets, and whether or not the idea that we are creating for that brand is actually capable of achieving their objective based on the budget they have.
Because when you talk about it in those sort of real terms, you realise that actually it’s not about being brave or about pushing the boundaries.
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Expensive Average
“The way that you consume a brand is different to how it was 20 years ago. I think that’s why a lot of brands have moved towards a global strategy, because they know that we live in a more transient world where I’m pretty sure there’s some statistics that show people move around more than they ever have,” Rory says.
“So, for me, the challenge is, I guess, to try and identify how you can have a really core strategy and a core idea that perhaps can be delivered slightly differently in each market.”
Rory cited a recent survey about the costs of mounting dull campaigns.
“The most expensive mistake is to accept average. Dull advertising is expensive.”
He encouraged the audience to engage people where they were already looking, and on the topic of dealing with uncomfortable truths in advertising, “Don’t just find them, confront them”.
And, as Rory points out, if you’re in remote New Zealand, you do have a different lens on. “When you’re at the edge of the world, you view things differently. You need to apply a lot of Kiwi ingenuity to be more innovative given the small population, vast distances and the remoteness of the country.”
