Everyone loves to talk about how much advertising is changing, how WOMM is the future, how cool nontraditional media can be. It’s something we heard a lot at the AAAA Account Planning Conference too, but we got to approach it from a slightly different angle. Planners are all about strategic insight, so the really cool case studies we got to see (and there were some REALLY cool ones) were focused in on the nugget - the little gem of insight from the desired audience that made all those really cool viral and buzz ideas possible. It was particularly encouraging that two of the three Gold winners of the Jay Chiat Planning Awards were brilliantly executed campaigns that launched themselves outside of the :30 spot and into a full brand experience. (The third gold [Martin's campaign for The Learning Channel], though still mostly confined to :30s, was still some really exquisite strategy.) But I want to draw attention to the other two golds for the purposes of this post.

First, there was the release of the Audi A3, done by McKinney. It was a pretty impressive online and offline stunt titled The Art of the H3ist in which the first A3 in America was stolen (and they really did it… if you’d been walking by at 0-dark-thirty, you’d have seen the whole thing). This extended into a full Alternate Reality Gaming experience (not entirely unlike The Lost Experience… which I’m still hooked on), culminating in the eventual location of the car. Why choose this complex avenue, when it would have been so easy to roll out like any other car launch? Because they chose to focus on a small segment of their target market - the young, affluent gamers - to let their enthusiasm build excitement from the inside out.

The second gold winner was by Bartle Bogle Hegarty for Axe Snake Peel. (This was not only a gold winner, but they won the Grand Prix - an honor that has not been awarded in 3 years!) The great insight in this effort to sell body wash to young men came from the all-too-well-known “walk of shame.” They heard from many of the young men they spoke to a resounding chorus of the regret over a questionable intimate encounter. Of course, they could have let the print and :30s speak to that insight and stop there. But instead… they created a cult. They developed The Order of the Serpentine, a secret society dedicated to helping young men scrub away their shame. But they didn’t stop with that online initiative. They also aired an hour ‘expose’ on Spike Network, revealing the secrets of this supposed cult.

In the end, both of these are examples of really frickin’ cool executions… but they can’t just be that. They had to come from a real (and usually very simply) nugget of truth about their desired audience. It’s not enough to do kooky or unexpected or nontraditional. It all has to come from a genuine conversation with and understanding of your customers… and it needs to stay true to the strategy and message gleaned from that insight. Veer too far for the sake of far, and you’ll lose them!

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