The case for creativity

If I were to ask you to name a creative marketing campaign, you would most likely come up with:

This

This

Or even this.

One of the biggest fallacies that I come across frequently, is the idea that to be creative you need to have a whopping great big marketing budget.

Personally, the most creative campaigns that I have ever worked on have had really tight budgets.

Why? Because when you have a constraint it forces you to hone your thinking and think outcome and impact first.

When you don’t have the luxury of millions or even thousands of pounds in media spend to support the idea and get eyeballs on the brand, you have bake into the idea levers that are designed to get people to talk and share about the brand on your behalf.

This can come in the form of being unexpected, or random, or nailing a human truth that people can rally behind. I have a talk ‘the case for creativity’ which I going the details on- I’m going to do a recording over the next few weeks and send it accrues.

But to use a case in point, right now, I wanted to share HANX’s (a sustainable condom company) Valentines campaign as an example of an effective creative campiagn done on a relatively small budget.

Whilst most brands fell into the normal valentines tropes- self love, their own take on poetry, buy one get one free for your partner, HANX chose to play differently and shine a light on a topic that no one is talking about.

Vaginismus- the painful side of pleasure. 

The campaign has been picked my news outlets, featured in blogs and industry press.

HANX have used this unexpected message to cut through the noise of everyone else and get eyeballs on the brand.

The cost, an idea and some pretty simple but effective design.

No huge media budgets, no intense 8 week production schedule.

The harsh reality is that we receive over 10,000 marketing messages every single day, and that is excluding the content from friends and family that we actually want to receive.

 So unless you do something memorable, something that makes them stop and actively notice you, you will just become wallpaper- forgotten about, banished into obscurity.

 Attention and memorability are the biggest challenges for any brand in 2023.

My advice to scale up brands is to think ideas first, what can you do throughout the year to get people to notice your brands. Gone are the days of one big push, instead what are the the multiple moments during the calendar that you can own in your own way.