Digital for digital’s sake is out
pharmafile | November 10, 2010 | Feature | Medical Communications | digital creativity, digital marketing, ipad, seven stones, youtube
Creativity in the digital world is twofold. On the one hand there is technical wizardry and, on the other, there are ingenious, original ideas.
The very real danger is that we may be seduced by the former while paying scant regard to the latter.
In the old days when print reigned supreme, there was a parallel. It had rather more than two folds. It was cardboard engineering. And it was expensive. If an agency didn’t have a creative thought, they resorted to push-me/pull-you type constructions to add sparkle to lacklustre ideas.
Did these achieve anything more than their simpler cousins? Most probably, not a lot.
Without the foundations of a good idea, digital can be a similar waste of money and perhaps even more so. After all, even with say a bad mailing, you have some idea of the coverage you are going to get – an unknown with some new media channels.
Then there are the set-up costs of digital, which have been known to make even the most well resourced brand manager wince.
Get digital right, however, marry cutting edge technology with truly engaging ideas, and it starts to get exciting.
Take iPads. They now show us what e-details should have always been but so often were not because of the cumbersome nature of tablet PCs – not to mention the often over-complex and expensive proprietary software they were based on.
Thanks to devices like the iPad and its user-friendly attributes such as lightness, instant fire-up and format switching – the e-detail i-detail can be a captivating and memorable mix of moving images, video and animation. This enables intuitive navigation and introduces well presented data that brings to life a brand’s message in a way that paper never could. The fact everything you produce on them can be readily transferred to an iPhone is a huge free bonus to help you spread the word even more easily. What a waste then, if you buy into iPads only to use them for what a lot of e-details seem to be, which is effectively an animated PowerPoint presentation.
Digital for digital’s sake is out. But while a digital campaign should not be ‘just because you can’, in the pharma sector it may well require a determined and pioneering spirit to overcome the ‘you just can’t’ brigade simply because something hasn’t been done before.
Pushing the boundaries of what’s possible is often what distinguishes creativity in the consumer sector.
For example, take a look on YouTube for Tipp-Ex’s interactive campaign, ‘A hunter shoots a bear’. [The ‘not safe for work’ video is here]
The advertising begins conventionally enough with a standard, 30-second YouTube video. Faced with a wild bear in his camp, a hunter is in two minds as to whether or not he should shoot it. Unable to pull the trigger, the hunter then reaches out of the ‘video’ to a nearby Tipp-Ex ad, using the product to cover the word ‘shoots’ in the video’s title.
Viewers are asked to type in their own ending and view the results.
It’s hilarious, keeping you engaged as you tap in multiple different endings. It is signed-off with the beautifully efficient, ‘Tipp-Ex. White and rewrite.’
For Tipp-Ex, perhaps the ultimate non-digital product, the creativity of this campaign and use of YouTube technology is an outstanding achievement.
But time for a word of caution.
While creative executions such as the Tipp-Ex campaign open our minds to the near endless possibilities of digital, we still need to demonstrate a good ROI in order to justify its place in the marketing mix. So perhaps there’s a third part to digital creativity, and that’s creative media planning to play to the medium’s strengths and avoid its excesses.
Proper media planning evaluates each medium on its ability to deliver against the core brand objectives.
Does it deliver the message to the right number of people effectively for less than other media options will do, or is it a lovely idea with little real coverage?
Does the medium allow for the right level of detail, or in reality is the audience never going to have the time and patience to sift through all the steps?
Does the brand need to communicate a lot of detail to a few interested parties, or does it need to get noticed and talked about by a majority?
For such a plan to work, it needs a core idea that is media neutral uniting the different strands of the campaign.
This is where the enormous limitations of the ‘one visual’ global branding approach become so painfully apparent.
Brands like Marmite, Nike and Red Bull may be famous for their ads, but media neutral thinking enables their campaigns to work as sponsorship ideas, websites, competition themes and exhibition or retail promotions.
We need the same flexibility in pharma if we are to make the most of the exciting creative opportunities that the digital world offers us.
James Klymowsky is head of digital at Seven Stones. For more information visit: www.sevenstones.co.uk
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