DAY TO DAY
High visibility projects are nice but they tend not to feed an agency. So, we do day to day stuff, with all the limitations we know, that usually prevent it from ending up in a portfolio. This said, it still represents a large part
of the work we do. So, I believe it deserves to be featured as much as the smarter and nicer-looking stuff. I find it reveals how adaptable we can be and the different kinds of skills and expertise we develop working on it. Like the following ones.
MAKING IT LOOK SERIOUS
A lot of brands (especially traditional marketers like P&G brands) rely on superiority as their main selling point. Often, though, they consider that showing someone in a lab coat to deliver a run-of-the-mill claim (with a number in it, numbers are very important) is enough.
With each new brief, we have to find new non boring approaches, be it finding the right insight that hasn’t been tackled yet, using cinematic CG effects or making it a craft story in which scientists seem to actually care about what they do.
The problem remains that so many brands want to say that their product is the best that superiority often makes your campaign invisible.
The more you work on those brands, the more you figure out ways to go around the seeming vapidity of the message you’re asked to convey and the more you know how to get people’s attention and trust.
Or you just use a celebrity. Celebrities work too.
MAKING IT LOOK FUN
When we don’t have a superiority message to work with - or we work with a brand that don’t consider that superiority is the only thing that matters in communication, we get the possibility to make things fun.
Whether it’s to tell Parisians that their Metro system is changing their lightbulbs, to exaggerate the effects of a cold or to shill cheap coffee machines to young people when they who move out of their parents’ house, it’s always possible to do it in an entertaining and fun way.
Creating so many hilarious campaigns through the years is how I have become the beast of humour that I am today.
This used to be an 8 minute interactive Youtube video but it has since been removed from Youtube (actor’s 2 years contract was over) and has now lost its interactivity.
MAKING IT SOUND GOOD
With my background as a musician and composer, I often try to give music a central role in the content I work on. Even when all we’re allowed to use is library music, I do my best to use it in the best way possible. Having the technical knowledge also helps when working with Audio houses.
When money is ridiculously low and time allows, I compose the tracks myself. Or, at the very least, I work on demos to help proper composers get there faster.
My dream remains to create a proper musical one day (I’m a huge fan of 50s Hollywood musicals) but in the meantime, I’ve settled on doing it to sell fruit Juice for Christmas, throat Lozenges in Australia and more.
MAKING IT WORK ANYWHERE
Our work as a regional team is to come up with platform ideas that are wide enough that the 2.5 billion people in the region can relate to it but at the same time specific enough that it feels like only this brand can own it.
And once we have this platform, we need to figure out how to express it in all the different markets in ways that makes sense for them.
For instance, Olay’s brand platform is “Your skin won’t pay for your sins” - though we don’t mean sins in the biblical sense. More like skin sins. Like staying under the sun for too long. Or partying late. Or eating greasy food. So gentle sins.
We need to make this brand platform work in countries as varied as Australia, Thailand or India. With their different views on what is acceptable as “sin” as well.
It requires a fair bit of cultural research and engaging with local agents to make sure that we have the right tone and choose the right situations.
MAKING IT FEEL LOCAL
Work in the regional team is also about executing some very local work, specific to a people’s culture and expectations, both in terms of insight and in terms of visual assets.
Thailand is a great example of a culture with their own idiosyncrasies and absurd humour.
Every country in the region is different and working for all of them separately helps learn what makes sense for one but not for the other. I
t also helps when it comes to convincing clients from various cultural backgrounds that what seems right for them might not be right for their target country.
These 2 films are part of a longer series about a love triangle in which the characters miraculously impact the outcome of bad situations thanks to their outrageously white smile.