The Future of Research: The future of creativity

Ipsos Connect | The Future of Research Series - Presentation 2016
© Ipsos MORI
Welcome
It’s the task of all advertising to gain attention for the brand and to contribute
to short and long term growth of the brand. But as we all know, this attention
is becoming ever more difficult to get.
To make sure I’ve got your attention let’s start with a little bit of audience
participation.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
The uninvited party guest.
The uninvited party guest who?
The uninvited party guest is you.
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The future of creativity
This, unfortunately, is the truth of the matter. No one is actively sitting there
waiting for your advertising to arrive on their doorstep. If advertising is the
uninvited and often unwelcome party guest, then what are the top tips to get
you through the door?
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3 Key reactions
There are likely to be 3 main reactions to an unwanted guest turning up at the door:
Who the hell are you?
Why are you here?
Now you are here you might as well be useful.
You will need to have answers for each of these to get you through the door and, of
course more importantly, invited back to the next party.
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1. Who the hell are you?
On to the first challenge - who the hell are you?
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The first tip is don’t turn up looking like a boring, door-to-door salesman,
who is out-of-date in today’s context.
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Be distinctively you
Rather, be recognisably you – as the reassuringly familiar person that they
have seen around the neighbourhood, this gives you a much better chance
of being let in.
Make sure you use your distinctive assets, big idea, campaign style and
tone of voice to help you present an acceptable front.
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2. Why are you here?
So you look familiar enough to be safe to let through the door, but why are
you here? Are you going to disrupt the party?
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Understand people’s motivations for being there
You must understand what people’s motivations are for being on that
platform, at that moment in time, and then you need to deliver something
relevant to that vibe.
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Don’t be responsible for the rise of the ad blocker
Don’t be responsible for ad blocking by being incongruent with the vibe,
irritating or creatively poor. Otherwise you will be responsible for the
continued rise in ad blocking and the shutting of the door on all future party
guests.
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3. Now you are here you might as well be useful
We have got through the door, taken the temperature of the party, what’s
next?
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What’s the definition of being a useful guest?
So what is the definition of being a useful guest?
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I think this quote sums it up perfectly.
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Why should we strive to be a useful guest?
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To gain attention
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Many elements conspire to limit attention
But there are many elements that conspire to limit people’s attention to our
comms – we see this in our comms tracking with a 10% drop in attention
over the last 5 years. Why? Because 54% of people, and this rises to c.
75% of millennials, are second screening while watching TV.
And of course on mobile there are physical limitations with people scrolling
so quickly to get to the things that matter to them. Or the distraction of the
vast quantities of content that are uploaded by the minute.
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Disrupt the norm
To gain attention you have to disrupt or subvert the norms of the platform
(while respecting the vibe of course!).
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Burger King making itself useful
Often being this charming guest will entail you being a little bit knowing,
acknowledging that you might not be wanted, but subverting the usual way
of doing things to make you stand out… here is a great example from
Burger King.
64 different executions based on the search terms of the viewer.
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Using the senses to optimise attention is a great strategy. If we first
consider sound…
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Sound breaks through due to evolutionary trace
As humans we have evolved to have an immediate reaction to sounds -
mainly of course so that we weren’t eaten by something lurking in the
bushes. But the same inbuilt reaction can raise our heads from the second
screen or the ironing.
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And it has been used to great effect
Here’s one that always brings our Connect CEO’s head up.
The ad perfectly sums up the inner thoughts of cool of the middle aged
parent, a bubble that can so easily be burst by a teenage child.
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Gives powerful emotional effects…
And audio can also bring powerful emotional effects. In a study we did for
the Advertising Research Foundation conference we looked at Super Bowl
ads using facial coding.
Here we found that audio in general just had the edge over visuals in terms
of producing emotional effects. And for some ads, such as the one here, the
audio by itself produced a higher level of emotional engagement than the
visuals by themselves.
Perhaps a reason to rethink the creative quality of your Radio ads!
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Horses for courses…
But sound has to be thought about carefully – as we saw in the VW
example, action oriented music can really give a great heads up reaction on
TV, but this isn’t consistently true across platforms.
In a study we worked on in conjunction with YouTube looking into the
reasons for skipping on their platform, we saw that calming, relaxing or
action oriented music was more likely to get a skip, whereas humorous
music was more likely to delay skipping. My hypothesis is that this is
because humour suits the vibe of the platform to a greater extent.
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The opposite of sound is silence.
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85% of video on Facebook autoplays in silence.
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Sales
So how to make the most of that potential limitation?
Here hotels.com play with lack of sound to great comic effect….
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Puppies, boobs and babies
Of course with visuals there are tried and tested methods – puppies, boobs
and babies are winners throughout time on gaining attention.
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You’ve got limited time… use it wisely
But on many platforms you’ve only got a very limited time to gain attention.
On Facebook, where people are scrolling through quickly, this is particularly
true. Studies published by Facebook show that you get optimum brand
impacts after only 3 seconds of viewing.
And of course on YouTube you’ve got 5 seconds to grab and engage them
before the Pavlovian skipping reaction kicks in.
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If it looks like an ad, it’s more likely to be skipped
In the YouTube study I mentioned before, it was found that if a pre-roll
looked like an ad it was more likely to get skipped i.e. if you badged it
heavily up front people would skip. However without branding there can be
no brand impact.
So how can you do it better?
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Instead truly integrate the brand into the video and make your content
relevant and entertaining as in this great example from Nintendo.
Impact can be achieved without needing to force branding at the
beginning

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Adapt for the technology – think mobile
You also absolutely must think about the technology. 50% of YouTube
video content is on mobile. Therefore think about optimising content for
mobile by making it short. ‘The Experiments in Video - Changing Habits and
Behaviours’ – ThinkWithGoogle study has shown you get 18% greater
brand awareness uplift for (shorter) mobile specific ads.
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And then of course we come to Snapchat – holy grail land of the
millennials? Or increasingly finding favour with 25-34 year olds. But also the
home of light, disposable fun.
So is it the right platform for your brand?
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Silly as you like as long as your brand is there
If it is, then you can push the limits and be as silly as you like, as long as
your brand is central to the idea and execution.
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3 things to get you invited in…
To finish off, here are the three things to get you invited in:
1. Ensure you are recognisably you
2. Think about why people are there and behave accordingly
3. Push the boundaries of the platform by being as creative, entertaining or
useful as you can possibly be
And in that way you can ensure that you get invited back to the next party!
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Ipsos MORI – Future of Research © Ipsos MORI This work was carried out in accordance with the requirements of the international quality standard for market research, ISO 20252:2006 and with the Ipsos MORI Terms and Conditions which can be found here
ELEANOR.THORNTON-FIRKIN@IPSOS.COM
020 3059 5024
THANK
YOU.
@IpsosMORI #futureofresearch

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Bringing the party to you
Having just enjoyed some really great examples of creativity done well,
we’re now going to change things around a little bit, to focus specifically on
people.
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It’s not a party without people
Going back to the earlier party analogy, it’s definitely not a party without
people.
By this, we mean that having a great creative idea is only one part of a
successful advertising campaign. Understanding your audience (people) is
absolutely key to ensuring you land that creative idea effectively.
It isn’t until you achieve this understanding that you can genuinely begin to
optimise your creative for successful delivery across platforms.
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We all want to be closer to the ‘in’ crowd
And naturally, nobody understands people better than they understand
themselves.
As a creative industry targeting many different audiences with multiple
campaigns, we can’t ourselves always be part of that in-crowd. So we crave
information to help immerse ourselves in the lives of these people – their
motivations, behaviours, expectations, the language they use – so that we
can engage them, strike a chord and importantly not appear out of touch in
our communications.
This hunger for first hand information is highlighted so successfully by the
article ‘A Teenager’s View on Social Media’; a teenager’s own account of
how he uses different social media platforms and his perceptions of each.
Amongst all of the professionally curated content available, this became the
most clicked article on Open Strategy in 2015.
So this got us thinking. If there is such a hunger to understand how best to
use and engage people on social media, what can we do to help?
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So we spoke to the people who do it best
So we did some research and we decided to spend some time with some of
the people who already do this really well. We spoke to 4 social media
experts and 4 social media influencers, to understand more about how they
currently engage audiences across social media, and what we and our
clients can learn from them.
By way of introduction, we are now going to share with you 3 key themes
that came out of these discussions.
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1. Know your platform’s audience
The first is to be platform specific and to absolutely know your audience
across each individual platform. When using social media, it is not enough
to simply ‘think social’. Instead, you will need to tailor your message, and
delivery of creative to each specific social media platform, to best suit the
distinct audience and culture that exists there.
At a very basic level, this starts with demographic profiling, but it goes a lot
deeper than that. It should include their needs and motivations for being
there, their expectations, their use of language and imagery, their openness
to brand messaging, etc.
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Use strengths of each platform to build one overall story
Once you know your audiences across platforms, you can start using the
individual platforms together, to incrementally build up one overall story.
This means using the strengths of each platform and tailoring your creative
to those, rather than duplicating the same message across all of them in the
same way.
This is explained well by one of our influencers, Jim Chapman. He
describes Instagram as the place where he presents the most beautiful and
polished version of himself; he’ll take 10 selfies and only the very best one
will appear on there. Twitter is his internal monologue and the place where
his stream of thoughts appears. Snapchat brings something very different; it
is the place where he can be ridiculous, experiment and have fun. As he
puts it “Together, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat add up to me as a whole”.
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2. Be authentic and relevant
The second key theme is around authenticity and relevance. By this, we
mean not entering conversations in a way that appears unnatural either to
the audience (either in timing or in language) or to yourself (in terms of not
being in keeping with your brand and personality).
The advice from our experts is that too often brands are trying too hard to
force their way into conversations in a way that does not sit well with
audiences. Those who do it best are timely and topical, show a genuine
understanding of the audience they are talking to, and stay true to
themselves. If you can’t be yourself on a particular social media platform
then, rather than shoe horning yourself in, the question should be whether
you have a presence there at all.
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Authenticity
Here’s a really great example from the camping and outdoor sports
company, REI. This it great because they took a real risk but it worked
exceptionally well, because they demonstrated a genuine understanding of
their audience.
On Black Friday of all shopping days, REI decided to close all of their bricks
and mortar stores and instead asked people to #optoutside.
Brand engagement rocketed and it had an overall positive impact on sales.
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3. Be shareable
Be shareable.
Over time as an industry, we have come to realise that likes and reach
alone do not necessarily equate to success on social media. For our
influencers, it is all about shares; the more shares they achieve, the more
they know their content has resonated, as to share is to indicate that
content is somehow significant to you.
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The best content is unique, unexpected and takes a risk. The aim of course
is to create those “core blimey” moments that mean people will
spontaneously talk about it down the pub, so that your creative idea is
shared even further.
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Most often, the examples talked about are the funny ones, so we thought
we’d show you something a bit different. The key message being that
content has to be bold, memorable and take a risk to work well.
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Not everything will work - but when it does it will be brilliant
So finally, to sum up with some key tips from our experts…
Not everything that you try will work well on social media but don’t let that
put you off, because when it does work it can be genuinely brilliant. So take
risks, have fun with it, experiment and be different.
However, in doing so, always ensure that people are at the very forefront of
your mind. Remember what works well and matters to them across each
social media platform, to ensure you make the very best of your creative
ideas.
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Ipsos MORI – Future of Research
BECKIE.GOODFIELD@IPSOS.COM
020 8515 3462
THANK
YOU.
@IpsosMORI #futureofresearch

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