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We were recently given the most baffling piece of advice from one platform exec. that left me deeply worried for the future of our craft.

Our team is pretty adept at squeezing the most out of the different platforms – it’s one of the reasons clients come to us. And we love to have regular updates with platform reps to understand what the current best practices are – it’s a great way to gain an unfair advantage for clients.

But this one piece of advice left us completely bewildered. On the surface it sounds reasonable, but the second you start to unpack it as a business idea, it becomes, quite frankly, ludicrous.

We were told that if we want to drive the most engagement when using creators, we should leave all branding and brand codes out altogether.

On the surface there’s logic there. You’re paying a creator to make something for their audience, so don’t go slapping your logo all over the place as it’ll scare people off and make it look hideously commercial.

But it’s missing the fundamental point of advertising.

Everything is about creating a brand or business impact. Or in layman’s terms “building brands and selling shit”.

If we break down what is actually being asked for here by the platform it’s this:

“Dear brand, please pay this person to make some content, but whatever you do don’t ask them to include brand codes in it because that would scare away the audience they’ve spent all this time building. And you want this piece of content you’re paying for to reach as many people as possible, don’t you?”

The logical response as a brand is “okay, what the f**k is in this for me?”

Seriously, we’ve jumped the shark.

If you’re a marketer investing money in any channel you of course want to know what the return is going to be. Marketing is the definition of the phrase ‘spend money to make money’.

But if your brand is dialled right back to insignificance (and don’t tell me a channel icon or a #tag is a distinctive brand asset) in a piece of creator content, then that really is a waste of money. It doesn’t matter if thousands or millions more people see it because it won’t have any impact on your brand or business.

I’m not advocating a heavy-handed approach where we demand creators tattoo the logo on their body and mention the brand repeatedly. Working with creators should be about collaboration. And simply making the brand DBA’s fit for the channel and the purpose is the best way to do this. Make them feel like a natural fit.

Without becoming another ‘best practice with influencers piece’, quite clearly there needs to be an understanding of how advertising works before we look to natural alignment and genuine fit in any partnership. Influencers in advertising aren’t a new concept by any means (The Marlboro Man, Clooney and Nespresso) and so combining their influencers with the principles of effective advertising needs to be addressed or we’re going to undermine their use completely.

Here are two examples from Who Gives a Crap of working with creators to demonstrate my point.

The first example is essentially a product review, but uses the DBAs of the brand extensively. Their packaging. Creatively it’s pretty bog standard for what we’ve come to expect on TikTok, but it got engagement. Importantly it drove click throughs at the time of posting, but it’s also exposed the brand so much it’ll be able to have a long-term impact.

The second example is definitely more engaging as a story is unfolding. But it’s long and we we only get two glimpses of the packaging in the minute-long setup before the hero shot at the end – hardly the stuff brand building dreams are made of and does nothing to build the brand in the mind of the consumer.

I’m the creative guy here and I’m the one saying ‘make the logo bigger’. That is a surefire sign that something is seriously wrong.

Read the article on Mumbrella →

What were the last five ads you saw? I’ll wait while you try to remember.

Chances are you’ve seen a couple of dozen ads in the last 30 minutes, there’s probably a couple to the right of this paragraph, but if you click off this page I bet you’d struggle to recall what they were.

Recently US-based ad executive David Droga told the Australian Financial Review: “The world sees marketing as just the attention side of things, shouting and disruption. And what doesn’t help is the majority of marketing is shit. I mean, it really is, let’s be honest. The death of our industry was the lazy and formulaic nature of what we did.”

I think he’s wrong. Not because most marketing is good, but because the majority of what we’re now turning out isn’t even good enough to be referred to as shit. Let me explain.

The thing with shit ads is that you remember them – they have impact. I defy anyone not to remember seeing these ads for Lube Mobile and Coles for a long time. They’ve certainly stuck with me.

 

Snobbishly, we as an industry call these shit. Why? Because we’ve allowed subjectivity to rule and not the fundamentals of what works.

You only need to go on Campaign Brief and look at the comments on one of the most successful campaigns of the year – Tourism Australia – and you’ll see the problem laid bare.

Or look at the recent Amazon Christmas ad which Campaign Mag UK have awarded the Turkey of The Week award. This ad tested off the charts with System One.

Both these examples are campaigns designed for the consumer, not for the industry.

The fact is, if an ad has grabbed your attention and made you feel anything then you’ll most likely remember it. It will work. See it enough and you’ll never forget it.

Which, frankly, is a lot more than the majority of ads being put out into the world are currently doing.

It’s a sea of sameness, beige mediocrity (recently coined the term ‘blandemic’). Most things don’t stand out, or even register on a subliminal level in the constant scroll. And if we’re not making even a momentary subconscious impact, are we even advertising?

Of course when we’re exposed to hundreds, if not thousands of ads every day we’re not going to remember them all. That would be fucking awful.

But when I talk about good advertising I don’t mean the kind of stunts that get talked about for a few minutes and generate a little social buzz. There’s a lot more to it than that. We’re talking about long term brand building. Burning memories into peoples minds so on the off chance, maybe, just maybe, one day, they buy you. It’s all probables and likelihoods.

Think back to your youth. You remember all the ads. And those ads interrupted your viewing pleasure, just in different channels from today. But it was ok. Because they were entertaining. They gave something to the audience outside of just selling. They gave us a feeling. Or a moment of entertainment. They used music and jingles and characters that stuck in our minds.

And although channels have evolved, people haven’t. We don’t evolve at the speed of digital. It takes the odd millenia. So there are lessons we still need to heed from the Madmen of old.

We’ve recently been advised by one social platform that “native and unbranded content performs better” on their platform so we should remove branding from work we do with creators.

Which is fine, if all you’re looking for is a large media number of hits. And completely shithouse if you’re actually looking to create any kind of brand effect.

If the audience enjoys what they’re watching but can’t commit it to memory and connect it to the brand that engaged them then it’s a complete waste of money.

More alarmingly, it’s undermining the effect advertising has on growth and the power of creativity to transform businesses. If every ad isn’t doing something to reinforce the brand codes (yes, even your most performance-based efforts) then you’ve missed out.

If you’re trying to hide the fact that your ad is an ad, then you may even be missing out anyway.

Some recent research we did with System1 for Menulog showed a correlation between people knowing it was an ad and increased happiness, telling us people don’t like being deceived.

We don’t make people laugh because it makes us feel good. We don’t shock people because it’s a thrill for us. We do it to make people feel something so we can connect a brand to that moment and be remembered.

There’s a simple truth to what we do. The role of advertising is to sell stuff. Sell stuff by building brands, persuading people to take one action over another.

The pipes are increasingly commoditised now. The smallest advertiser can now login to an ad manager account and buy the same audiences as the biggest corporate. So creativity becomes the differentiating factor in the attention arms race.

Which should be great news – because as humans creativity is now our one advantage over the machines.

But next time you’re designing a campaign or signing off on creative, ask yourself one simple question – who will care about this? If the answer’s ‘no one’, then why bother?

Read the article on Mumbrella →

Dave

Back in 2008 I worked for an agency called TCO, one of the original content businesses in the country. It was run by a chaotic visionary which made it an incredibly challenging but also incredibly rewarding and formative period in my career.

When Tom joined the company from the UK, he was your typical, polite Englishman – he couldn’t believe how archaic Australian creative and media was and still wore jeans from the 90s. We got on immediately. We were both passionate about our work and used each other as therapists for the daily rollercoaster of life at TCO.

What we really connected over was bringing his comms planning background and my creative and production thinking together. Although we never worked on the same clients, we’d always solve briefs over lunch or after work and it genuinely felt like we were doing something different to the industry norm.

I left TCO in late 2009 to start my own business, Infinity Squared. For the next 4 years I ran and grew Infinity’s reputation for being the go-to content and branded entertainment business in Australia. We brought in a roster of world class film directors, as well as a creative partner Nick Boshier who was the brains behind some of the country’s most famous YouTube creations including Beached Az, Bondi Hipsters and Trent from Punchy.

During those years Tom and I stayed mates, having beers, exercising together and always chewing the fat about work.

In 2014 I EP’d a TV show deal with ABC to make the world’s first crowdsourced multiplatform TV show. It was ambitious and needed someone to coordinate the participation of the audience who would, in essence, dictate what each week’s episode would be. The timing for Tom was perfect.

The show was a huge success, winning an international Emmy Award but more importantly, it showed Tom and I that there was something in telling stories in a non-linear way.

So Tom joined Infinity Squared and the rest is history.

Like any relationship it takes work. It’s a bit like a marriage. There are ups and downs, there are times when you could (and do) lose your shit. But I think we’ve grown to understand each other and what drives us.

Tom loves channels and media and I love creativity. And I think that’s the secret sauce. Neither of us are as strong as a solo act.

Tom

Dave and I met back in 2009. I’d just moved to Australia from the UK and joined The Conscience Organisation, one of Sydney’s original social and content agencies. We met at training and were asked to introduce ourselves with a fact. Dave’s opening line was less than savoury but it made me laugh. 14 years on and not much has changed. He makes me laugh a lot.

My background was in media and planning while Dave’s was in content and production. From the get-go, we had a healthy balance between planning and creativity. Dave’s approach was so refreshing from traditional ad peeps I’d worked with in the past. He was dead set on creating entertainment not ads and he didn’t care about what channel it was going in as long as it made someone laugh or cry. It was all about the ‘gooseys’. My challenge was helping him channel this in a way that would build brands and sell shit. I think it’s been the key ingredient to our success working together.

Dave’s always been the Aussie bogan to my blue-blooded Brit. He’s dick jokes, I’m dad jokes. He loves Metallica and HipHop, I love musicals and WSFM.

In 2010, Dave left TCO to start Infinity Squared and I stayed on to grow it from a 9 to 30 person agency, getting companies like Coca Cola, Westfield and Nestlé onto social.

When I eventually left in 2013, Dave and I partnered up on an influencer agency called The Creators Network, signing top beauty, food and comedy YouTubers. Dave likes to leave this part out of our story because it was a massive flop – we had some success launching Bondi Harvest but it turned out managing 19 year old YouTubers was a little soul destroying…

It did get us into business together though. The next year, Dave brought me on to help with #7 Days Later – a world first social TV show that made a weekly episode based on suggestions from an online audience. The problem was they had no idea how to find and build that audience. That’s where I came in. The show went on to win an Emmy Award and we realised this approach to connected storytelling was something brands weren’t getting from traditional agencies.

From there I joined Infinity, building it into a full service creative remit, winning businesses like Lion, SEEK and Maccas. In 2018 we divided the full service and production offering and officially launched our creative agency, Connecting Plots.

Our relationship is not without its fair share of tension. There are times where I want to kill him. But there’s also a lot of good times. We’ve created businesses and a whole lot of work we’re incredibly proud of.

The company, which owns global bakery and café brands Muffin Break and Jamaica Blue, appointed the independent creative agency in June 2023 following a competitive pitch.

As part of the remit, Connecting Plots will build better synergies between brand and retail advertising across campaign and always-on comms for both Muffin Break and Jamaica Blue brands.