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Keep it simple and remember who your audience is

Simplifying things, keeping the consumer centre stage, and landing brave clients have all been key to Rory Gallery’s success, the award-winning strategist tells dentsu’s Dave Winterlich

A lot of people are complicators. Rory Gallery, partner and chief strategy officer at Special, New Zealand, classifies himself as a simplifier.

Fri May 3 2024 - 05:00

Rory Gallery comes from a rural farming background in Co Clare. Early on in his advertising career, he learned to turn what felt like outsider status to his advantage.

“In marketing, there’s a lot of marketing talk. A lot of people are complicators. I would definitely class myself as a simplifier. The way I often think about it is, if I was standing in front of my friends from back home, and talking, would they make fun of me?” he explains.

“Keeping things simple and remembering who your audience is has proven to be a really useful thing in this industry for me, because ultimately what we are trying to do is explain to and attract people who don’t work in our industry.”

It’s a belief that has guided him through a stellar career, including at McCann Erickson Dublin and AMV BBDO London. Gallery is partner and chief strategy officer at New Zealand agency Special and over the years has worked with some of the world’s best-known brands, including Guinness, Mastercard and Heineken.

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He has also picked up many awards, including Lions, Effies and Asian Spikes. He was personally crowned brand planner of the year.

“I definitely feel that embracing who I am, where I’ve come from and the skills that I bring to the table — as opposed to trying to be something that I’m not — is what enabled me to thrive in my career,” he says.

“It’s about simplicity, trying to be real, and taking real people on the journey of what you’re trying to do with a brand, as opposed to using big words, big concepts, and being too philosophical.”

This realisation helped turbocharge an already burgeoning career for Gallery, who is married to a Kiwi and has lived in Auckland for the past six years.

The Special offices in Auckland, New Zealand

He started out with an arts degree with no idea what to do next. His brother, already in advertising, encouraged him to do a master’s in advertising at Technological University Dublin. “He wanted me to work in a media agency because I’d get free tickets to sports events,” he laughs.

It proved a good fit, and he developed an early interest in planning.

One of his biggest successes involved Tayto Crisps, part of a campaign in which Mr Tayto launched an autobiography so successful it outsold that of former taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

Crisp wars

In further campaigns, the crisp icon looked for love. “One of the interesting observations coming out of the research was that younger people, in particular, loved the fact that this character had a voice and loved engaging with it at a time when Walkers, a really big competitor, had Gary Lineker,” says Gallery.

A novel deal with retailers to make it available wherever Tayto crisps were sold, backed by an outdoor campaign, helped drive sales. But, says Gallery, all credit went to the late Ray Coyle of Largo Foods and Rita Kirwan, its marketing director, for being brave enough to back it.

Brave clients showed up for another award-winning campaign, Kiwi Sceptics, for Air New Zealand. The initiative stemmed from research revealing Australians’ desire to visit New Zealand but reluctance to act even though 97 per cent of Aussies who did travel there, said they’d go back.

The campaign made pioneering use of branded content, still very much a nascent art form in 2011, by what he describes as cajoling four Australian influencers into visiting New Zealand. Recruited under the rouse they were travelling to an exotic location; it was later revealed they would be visiting New Zealand with responses posted on socials.

It was a risk. “They started their journey absolutely hating it. One guy actually got out of the car on the way to the airport when he found out. He really was not keen, but ended up absolutely loving it.

“For us it was about how do we convince the client to do this, and thankfully, again, that client was very brave and willing to trust us.” It proved a huge success, and the scepticism of those travelling was what created its value.

“If we just took people who wanted to go, there’s no drama. Then there was the question of, ‘do we really want to cast real people or actors?’ But those are the things you need to hold on to, to make sure an idea is really good.

Glass and clay

Rory Gallery of New Zealand-based agency Special

It’s a theme he comes back to, describing the concept of “glass and clay”. It refers to those elements of a good idea which break if changed and those elements which can be moulded through feedback.

He believes good brand platforms are iterative, just as each latest edition of the iPhone is better than the last. During his time at AMV BBDO in London, he contributed to projects like Guinness’s Sapeurs, a success under the brand’s Made of More platform, winning seven Cannes Lions. He also co-authored the gold-winning Guinness Made of More IPA Effectiveness paper.

The TV advert, which was shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, aired during the recession and was designed to resonate with an audience tired of austerity. It displayed not just the human element of Guinness but the sense of celebration and community reminiscent of a busy Irish pub.

Similarly, for 100 per cent New Zealand, a brand platform more than 20 years old, he was part of the team behind Good Morning World, an iteration that leveraged New Zealand’s geographical position and used real New Zealanders to welcome people around the world to each new day.

Death and the salesman

He pulled off a coup for Kiwi insurance company Partners Life too, advertising its life assurance product at the end of The Brokenwood Mysteries, a successful crime drama during which someone dies each week.

The campaign had a character who was killed off, then came back at the end of each show to say they wished they had sorted out life assurance first. But the real coup was that the advert featured before the credits.

He has also worked on campaigns to get New Zealand’s diaspora to vote in their home country’s elections, as is their right. Their innovative approach, featuring a Russian character urging Kiwis to meddle in New Zealand’s election, garnered significant additional publicity during a time of heightened fears about election interference. As an integrated advertising, design and PR agency, that’s something at which Special is particularly adept.

“New Zealand is similar to Ireland in that we don’t have the big budgets you have in New York. We’re always trying to make every dollar go further, which is why media is always a big part of our thinking,” he explains.

Ensuring clients get the most possible bang for their buck is why it is so important that clients understand when, and when not, to give feedback.

“The worst thing that can happen is that you feedback to the point that everything has changed. Quite often people don’t realise they’re doing it, but you just end up with something that is, unfortunately, average,” he says.

There’s a reason the agency is called Special, he says. “It’s because buying average work is one of the most expensive mistakes that you can make in our industry.”

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