Summary
From Context to Communication Planning, the evolving consumer and media landscape has spawned a profusion of planning specialisms; an abundance of smart, new media, new era rhetoric and opinion.
The logic goes that a more complex world requires more niche expertise: Bigger teams, made up of more specialists, for more complicated challenges.
Is this necessarily the case?
This paper describes a global project for Nokia delivered by a small, multi-skilled team.
A hybrid combination of creative strategist and strategic creatives.
Planning produced a Communication Design to deliver:
- Strategy based on Fitting in, not Standing out;
- Understanding of emerging cultural behaviour;
- Ongoing monitoring and tactical direction;
- Fluid development of creative output -planning & creative responding to consumer involvement in real time.
A strategic approach that produced more interesting work, better results and significant added
value for Nokia.
Brief
Nokia briefed us to launch the Supernova range of "style phones" to their more youth-centric segments (social, style-oriented, less affluent).
Nokia tasked us with improving the brand's style credentials and addressing stagnating youth preference.
Their expectation was for a global ATL advertising campaign: gorgeous devices in the hands of
aspirational people.
Business challenge
Nokia had become disconnected from a younger, mid-market, style-oriented audience -a group representing nearly 40% of the population in certain key markets (Russia, China, Brazil) - neither making relevant devices nor engaging them with communication.
At the same time, competitors like Samsung had been aggressively targeting these younger segments with communication and stylish phones.
In the UK this was particularly marked, Nokia suffering a significant decline in youth preference
(2005-2007).
On a global level, preference had remained static across the same period with competitors like Samsung experiencing huge increases (Sony Ericsson's doubled across 2007).
Youth preference is a strong driver of market share, average sales price, and margins -left unaddressed this represented a threat to the future of the business.
The launch of the Supernova range represented Nokia's response.
Our task: To support this more relevant product offering with communication that could engage the audience and make Nokia a brand they would want to be seen with again.
Strategy
Fitting in vs. Standing out
The mobile market is saturated with pictures of shiny phones brandished by even shinier people:
one-way communication, screaming: "I'm STYLISH."
Stripped of branding, attribution becomes impossible. Following the category clich's was never going to work. But then advertising wasn't really the problem.
Nokia is the market leader, a behemoth: Your grandma is as likely to own a Nokia as your younger sister. This is challenging when you are trying to win kudos with a younger audience and build style credentials.
More than simply losing relevance for a youth audience, Nokia had begun to suffer from an 'awkward dad at the disco' image.
Our challenge, the brand's challenge, was not about standing out, making a big noise, but rather learning how to fit into the audience's increasingly digital lives.
We needed to help Nokia get closer to this audience, better understand them and fit into their world.
And while Nokia as a brand might not be the most important thing in their lives, we knew that their mobile phone certainly is.
Phone as extension of "Self"
For at least several hundred years, there have been just two things people check for when they leave the house: Money, and keys.
Now there is a third - the phone.
In fact, what we found was that for young people all over the world, the phone is the most
important of the three.
You can borrow someone else's money, you can get someone else to let you in the house, but for
our young audience, their mobile is indispensable. It is the conduit and enabler of almost everything
they do.
If you want to get to know them just spend five minutes looking through their phones - we did:
friends, messages, photographs, videos and music.
Their phones are the perfect window into their lives. So intimate, that they expressed reservations about who they would share the contents with and real anxiety about losing their phone.
What does your phone know about you?
This was rich creative territory. We were getting somewhere.
Embrace Voyeurism
Culturally, we were interested by something else, too.
From the media the audience consumes to the intimate details they share, there seems to be a re-drawing of personal boundaries.
Their lives and the lives of their friends documented, shared and discussed: one long drama, just like the celebrities they follow in Heat.
Voyeurism has become everyday, influencing not only the entertainment the audience consumes
but also the way they relate to each other.
Interactive > Passive
Technology is an essential part of their lifestyle. They're experts at multi-tasking and prodigious
consumers of media. Obsessed with media and technology they give credit to people and brands
that use it well.
They expect their entertainment to be interactive whether it is playing Guitar Hero, voting on Britain's Got Talent or shaping the storylines of web dramas like Kate Modern.
We couldn't expect this audience to sit patiently and passively listen to advertising.
If we wanted to engage them we had to entertain them and that meant offering an interactive experience they could play with.
Getting to our idea
We had our strategy and understood what we needed to do to deliver it:
- Fit in, don't stand out;
- Explore the phone as window;
- Embrace voyeurism;
- Invite interaction.
The idea
If you found someone else's phone would you be tempted to look through it?
SomebodyelsesPhone.com: a web drama told through three characters' Supernova phones.
We set out to share the lives of three characters from around the world - Anna, Luca and Jade through
a 24/7 live feed of phone content over three months, inviting the audience to follow and shape
their stories.
The narrative arcs were developed and plotted by young, international writers with a track record for compelling entertainment.
Crucially, the narrative was open-ended so that the audience could influence the storylines.
Calls, voicemails, texts, pictures, videos and music, the characters - Supernova handsets became an
intimate window into their lives.
We made the product central to the entire experience and produced over 3700 pieces of content.
Communication design
WHEN STRATEGY MEETS TACTICS
Where planning's focus is often on operating upstream, much of our strategic energy was aimed
downstream because crucially that was where the real creativity began.
We created a campaign design to guide what, where and how the communication should be
experienced.
An approach that helped us keep focused while also delivering incremental media value through:
- Better negotiated partnerships (securing editorial not just advertorial support);
- More intelligent use of our own media (microsite, nokia.com and MyNokia database);
- Understanding how to leverage creative assets to earn additional media value (syndication);
- Creation of a campaign database of the most engaged fans.
1. Communities already exist
Rather than build a new community from scratch we worked with existing communities on and
offline.
We briefed Nokia Connectors (brand advocates on campus), giving them stickers and phone
content to build intrigue around the characters and drive traffic online.
We created and maintained Facebook pages for our characters where people could sign up as 'fans'
and enter into direct dialogue.
And we reached out to style, fashion, gossip, media and technology bloggers sharing content and offering access to the characters.
2. Engage through Culture
Planning worked with a style journalist to create a global Insider Guide containing mobile phone facts, celebrity gossip and cultural titbits all exploring the intimate relationship we enjoy with our
mobiles.
These guides provided ready-made stories for local territories to share with PR contacts and were designed to build broader conversation around the insight before the advertising launched.
3. Create a social object
In Henry Jenkins words, we wanted to 'produce something that both pull[ed] people together and
[gave] them something to do'.
We invited the audience to join in, the characters actively asking fans -sometimes collectively,
sometimes individually by name - for advice.
The community worked together, discussing the evolving storylines.
For the most involved this became an obsessive occupation, regularly responding to wall posts, SMS-ing the characters, even creating forums to share more in-depth speculation about plot developments.
4. Deliver multiple entry points
Following the launch phase, designed to introduce the idea and characters, we used broadcast media to share story highlights: prompts to drive engagement and re-connect the audience with the ongoing stories.
Planning informed the narrative to ensure weekly dramatic "spikes" that we packaged as catch-up
trailers on E4 -to give a UK example -and other youth channels.
We promoted these online with video and blog communities, using them as the basis for storylinebased
conversations.
5. Nurture friendships
Borrowing from game design, we created a series of rewards calibrated to deliver incentives at all
levels of interaction.
From casual viewer to enthusiastic fan, these rewards were designed to encourage ongoing interaction throughout the campaign. While much of this system was developed in advance, what made the whole thing so fun (and scary) was introducing new rewards in response to activity we hadn't anticipated.
The characters' stories all converged, culminating in a party in Paris.
Several of the most engaged fans attended, winning their place by following clues we had hidden across
somebodyelsesphone.com, Facebook and a series of secret sites.
At the party, these fans featured as stars in their own right, the ultimate public celebration of their involvement.
Evolved approach
From the outset we knew that to be successful we needed to maintain a conversation with the
audience.
This was a key tenet of the strategy. We were less sure how we were going to do this in
practice.
Producing creative work in real time is not something advertising agencies are designed to
do. It is not something clients are geared up to approve.
Working as a small, multi-skilled team really helped. It freed us up to work faster, with greater fluidity.
Planner, creative team, two producers, and two account handlers, everyone shared strategic and creative responsibility.
We were able to work together, live writing: dynamically responding to fan ideas and comments.
We counted key clients as an extension of this team (roping them in to voice peripheral
characters!).
We agreed the strategic, creative and client considerations before launch: what we wanted to say; how we would say it; what we could and should be responding to... Agreeing this detail in advance liberated us from the usual protocols and layers of approvals.
Using a combination of buzz tracking tools we followed conversation threads across a wide range of digital environments, identifying influencers within the growing community.
This informed our activity, the narrative constantly adapting to real time stimulus and events.
The success of this dynamic dialogue persuaded us to 'leak' the characters' phone numbers on
Facebook.
With fans able to contact the characters directly through their phones an even more intimate connection was made.
By sharing advice, comments and thoughts via SMS and MMS the senders became featured personalities in the broader community.
Some results
We attracted 1.27 million visits to the site, visitors spending an average of 5 minutes.
8% became 'lifelong visitors' returning continuously throughout the campaign.
7000 of the most engaged signed up to the Facebook pages as fans.
Inspired forums and conversation generating nearly 30,000 mentions across blogs (80% of which were positive in sentiment).
Most significantly, we delivered what we set out to do: creating an entertaining experience and engaging in a direct conversation with our audience.
We did this by working together as a tight multi-disciplinary team invested in the success of the campaign for almost 12 months.
Evidence of a positive increase in youth preference across the territories supporting the work.
While it is difficult to directly attribute this to the campaign, the global tracking study commissioned by Nokia clearly established that visitors to the site showed:
- Significantly improved consideration of Nokia;
- Improved leadership perceptions and emotional connection with Nokia;
- Enhanced purchase intention.
Conclusions
Faster, more focused and fluid, our experience suggests that smaller, multi-disciplinary teams may be better placed to deliver complex, dialogic campaigns than bigger teams made-up of many specialists.
The development of a 'Communication Design' allows planners and creatives to work more effectively together.
Traditional boundaries rejected in favour of more collaborative working.
This evolution needs to begin with planning because only planning has the means and imagination to persuade clients and creatives to become more inventive.
We believe this evolution is worth undertaking. The rewards are manifest: more interesting work, addressing more interesting challenges, delivering better results.
And importantly: more fun doing it.
This is the submission for the APG Creative Strategy Awards submitted by Wieden & Kennedy London.
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