You have to make time for creativity
Boring marketing comes not from boring marketers, but busy ones. Good ideas take time.
I sometimes vent with other marketers about how easy life would be if I worked in a more creative industry. Like promoting movies or selling cologne. Sticking Chris Hemsworth on anything is a winning idea. It’d be easy. Watch the money role in.
But I don’t. I work in finance. Martin Lewis is my Hemsworth and everything I do comes with terms and conditions. Marketing in this work can be painfully boring.
I’ve realised though that boring marketing comes not from boring marketers, but busy ones. There are brilliant, clever and interesting ways to talk about anything and given enough time, any brand has the chance to draw people in with brilliant creative ideas to make their website, ads and campaigns sing.
Agencies will always think they’re better positioned to do this for you. And most of the time they’re probably right. But creating a culture around creative excellence in-house will only make the work agencies do for you better. It’s not a zero sum game.
Over the last couple years, I’ve tried to create a culture within Yonder’s marketing team to always be improving the quality of our ideas and execution. World class won’t happen overnight, but we’ll naturally get there if each time we’re improving on the previous bit of work.
Here’s what I’ve learnt.
Good ideas take time
Coming up with creative marketing ideas takes time. Like any skill, it takes practice and it takes work. You can’t do on the side of your desk and expect brilliance.
If you’re running a marketing team it’s your job to make it a priority for your team, otherwise it won’t happen. Give them time and space and make them accountable for their creative ideas. If it’s how you measure their success, they’ll be incentivised to do it well. If it’s an expectation on top of everything else they’re doing, it’ll be the first thing to go and before you know if you’ll be putting your customers to sleep.
No one else will do it for you, you have to be the creative champion and keep the bar high when everything else is pulling you back down to the mean.
Start with an insight
Every good idea comes from somewhere and often it’s just a little nugget that inspires an idea. Last year we went viral when we got booted out of The Queue at Wimbledon for trying to give away croissants and strawberries to people at 4am.
What was the insight? A customer had mentioned they couldn’t get tickets in the pre-sale and that they’d have to join the queue instead. Pre-sale was for the elite, we reckoned, and Yonder was for the people. So we joined them.
We then followed that up with a campaign we called Make It Rain. And the idea came from the sense that the UK’s summer had been pretty shit and everyone could see summer slipping away with a whimper. So when it rained on our office, we sent emails to people and the first to click on the email would win whatever prize was inside. It was our biggest period of word-of-mouth growth ever at the time and we had people text, emailing and writing in whenever it rained demanding an email.
Earlier this summer we launched another campaign, this time literally paying anyone in the UK back if they spilt their drink this summer. The idea came through an agency partner, but the insight came from seeing England fans launch their beers into the stratosphere whenever they scored. We launched it the day of the Euros and received hundreds of claims over the summer.
Anyway, this isn’t a way to show our back catalogue, just highlighting that ideas don’t need to come from expensively generated surveys or research. Some marketers will drown in data - it’s just not going to get you there. A small insight is enough to get started, something that taps into the zeitgeist like the bad weather or a passing comment from a customer. They’re all starting points.
Always reject the first few ideas
Your first few ideas are always the same ones ChatGPT will come up with. So get them down then get them out of the way. The most obvious ideas are by their very nature the least interesting. So get comfortable with the process of rejecting your ideas over and over and over again. The original idea for Make It Rain was a concept around rain insurance (which you can see we later turned into Pint Protection).
Earlier this year we launched a new benefit designed around a super flexible flights rewards program. The first three ideas were:
We charter a flight
We do an activation at the airport
We make a video of a flexible contortionist
Nothing particularly wrong with these ideas, but all pretty obvious. After digging a little further we landed on an insight from our competitor’s TrustPilot. Their reviews kept referencing things like their points being '“useless” with one review saying they’d need therapy after trying to use their points. Bingo. We were off to the races.
Refine your final idea until it’s ready
No idea will ever be perfect but like the point above, your first expression of your winning idea is likely not going to be the best version of it. For all of the examples I’ve given, there were about fifty iterations before we felt they were done. I say we, but mostly it was me. My team we working on pulling these together and, frustratingly for them I imagine, I would send them back to the drawing board over and over until the idea felt right.
There’s no way to know really when a creative idea is ready to go, but I do think it comes with practice. The original plan around joining The Queue had us going on day 3 or 4. We ended going on the first morning, seizing the opportunity to be first, and that’s where all the value was for us. By the end of the week there had been a load of copycat ideas that had nowhere near the impact we did. If we went with the original plan, we’d have missed our shot.
Refining your idea, message and strategy over and over and over is so important to getting to do idea.
In summary, like anything in life, the best ideas take time and effort. You’re not boring, you’re just busy. Start making time for ideas and they will come.