Campaigns from the cutting room floor
Nice ideas die every day of the week
Most great ideas don’t get made. Agencies make most of their money on good, not great, ideas. And it’s not because great ideas aren’t being had. They’re just hard to get up. Creatives learn to enjoy the process, and approach outcomes with a degree of fatalism. And when a campaign they like gets killed, they bury it respectfully in the bottom drawer. Here are three of mine.
It’s beginning to look a lot like pregnant
Pregnancies spike over the Christmas holidays. But if it’s not planned, it’s too late to get pregnancy cover. That’s because the waiting period for pregnancy cover is 12 months, but for babies it’s only nine months. So in partnership with Durex condoms, we aimed to get traction in news with that fun Chrissy pregnancy fact, and cut-through with a message to keep it wrapped this Christmas.
This was an open PR brief from Medibank to raise brand awareness at Christmas. Cutting through at such a noisy time of year would take a big, engaging story and this felt like it had the most potential. Medibank loved the conception of this idea, but failed to carry it to term.
Using Instagram stories to screen kids’ eyesight
Kids’ vision problems are tricky to pick up, because kids think what they see is normal even if it’s not. It can take a while for a parent to connect headaches, eye rubbing or squinting to vision problems. So this concept for Specsavers found an innovative way to screen kids’ eyesight using kids’ stories on Instagram stories.
This was a recruitment task for a job I later got. The brief was to come up with a way to screen for vision problems in kids using Instagram. My solution was a detective story that included a range of tests disguised as story challenges, for example finding a clue. Each challenge was presented in three story segments, each progressively easier. Kids simply had to pause to story by touching the screen when they’d solved it, alerting parents. Specsavers was a client of this agency, but I’m honestly not sure if this work was presented. Little shortsighted if you ask me.
Helping home cooks plate up something special
Who doesn’t love a pitch. Twenty minds at work, messy war rooms and a piece of pizza inexplicably stuck to the wall. This pitch for Birdseye was for the Deli range of frozen seasoned vegies. With Birdseye Deli it doesn’t take much to give it the Deli touch, which was the creative platform I came up with. Catchy line, legs for days.
We got to the final two. But while both agencies had great creative, our competitors beat us by nailing the CX, from social post to in-store. We’d included a couple of in-store touchpoints at the end of the deck, but had wrongly focused on ATL. Our bad. But I still got Adam Zwar to record my voiceover, which was a career goal. This video is VO only and intended to play against live action.