Christmas is an important time in the advertising calendar.
Not alone do brand managers want to be ‘top of mind’ as consumers shop for gifts, but they know the right campaign will help lodge their products or services in the national psyche for the rest of the year too.
For its flagship Christmas campaign, online department store Littlewoods Ireland turned to award winning Dublin creative agency Boys + Girls.
“Christmas is an important time for Littlewoods Ireland because they sell a huge range of goods. But Christmas is also an important time to get brand messaging across, to show what a brand is about,” says Rory Hamilton, the agency’s co-founder and chief creative officer.
His team worked with marketing executives at Littlewoods Ireland to establish not just what they wanted the campaign to do, but how they wanted it to feel.
Cheap sentiment was out of the question. “The last thing you want is for people to feel that they are being emotionally manipulated. That’s a complete turnoff and performs the exact opposite function to the one you want. We take the approach that you can’t fake emotion,” says Hamilton.
The Littlewoods Ireland video shows a little girl decorating a box, blowing a kiss on a heart shaped piece of paper and giving it to her mother, who is delighted. Christmas is not about presents, the ad says, it’s about love.
The creatives at Boys + Girls developed the idea the way they always do, by seeking out a real, authentic experience on which to base it. Young creative team Conor Marron and Roisin O’Mahoney based it on a real-life experience O’Mahoney had as a child, when a teacher asked her class to each decorate a box and put a kiss in it for their Mum.
“Her mother still brings the box out at Christmas,” says Hamilton. “It’s about stuff that really happens. You can tell a real story. It isn’t fake. Littlewoods Ireland wanted the ad to convey just how much effort parents put into Christmas, to make sure their children have an amazing time.”
It was not overly branded. “Everything about it had to look authentic. It’s a real story that doesn’t put Littlewoods at the centre of Christmas, but love. Littlewoods Ireland is delighted with it and the feedback on social media has been really positive too.”
Stand Up Awareness Week
[ BeLonG To Youth ServicesOpens in new window ]
When BeLonG To, an LGBTI+ charity that supports young people, needed help promoting Stand Up Awareness Week, a number of creative teams jumped at the chance.
Stand Up Awareness Week is a campaign for secondary schools that aims to tackle the fact that one in five LGBTI+ young people face bullying, and 73 per cent feel unsafe, at school.
It’s one of the causes that IAPI, the advertising industry body, along with their member agencies, production partners, clients and 2FM supports each year by providing a cross-agency collaborative creative team who create campaigns on a pro bono basis.
One of the first to answer the call was Fiona Cunniffe, a senior account manager at In the Company of Huskies.
“My role is to work with clients to build relationships, making sure the creative teams are fully briefed on what’s needed, and working with them to make it happen,” she explains.
“Every year IAPI brings together a team of people from different agencies. Everyone was delighted to get involved in BeLonG To Stand Up Awareness anti bullying campaign, to get people to stand up to LGBT+ bullying not just in schools but nationwide.”
A planner worked with BeLonG To to develop the strategy for the campaign.
“The first thing is to agree who it is you are talking to and what you want to say. In this case, we wanted to change behaviour, so we looked at the strategy around language. We found that kids in school will very often say things like ‘that’s so gay’. Our goal was to change behaviours to stop using hurtful language, and start using positive language instead,” she says.
In all, nine of Ireland’s top agencies were involved in the production, including TBWA / Dublin, where creative director, Niall Staines, headed up the project. He too jumped at the chance.
“BeLonG To has such a great reputation, and it’s such a great cause, that I wanted to dedicate my time to it, even though we’re busier than ever during the pandemic and all working from home,” he says.
Rachel O’Donovan, strategic planning director at BBDO Dublin came on board too. “She was brilliant. It was thanks to her research that we discovered an issue around language. There are still lots of homophobic slurs in the vernacular, so that became the brief,” he explains.
The idea was to focus on words that heal rather than hurt, and to use projection to project crossed out negative words on to people in the video advertisement, all of whom were volunteers from the LGBTI+ community.
“These words are projected on to people their whole life, especially during their formative years in their teens, a time when it has real impact, sometimes devastatingly so,” he says.
Creative production studio Algorithm, which specialises in stunning visual experiences, created the projections. “It felt like a shoot that would cost between €100,000 and €200,000, and it was all done with zero budget, on the basis of favours,” says Staines. “We were delighted with it and the client loved it.”
Women’s Aid
The creatives at Huskies handled another topic, domestic violence, with great sensitivity too for client Allianz, on behalf of the insurer’s charity partner, Women’s Aid.
The campaign was the work of creative team Laura Rice, a senior art director at the agency, and Aoife McCleary, an award winning senior creative copywriter.
“Allianz is a fantastic client to work with which does lots of community and sports sponsorship. It refreshed its corporate and social responsibility activity six months ago and through the research we did with them found that Women’s Aid is a perfect fit, given that both organisations are about protection,” explains Rice.
The incidence of domestic violence rose during lockdowns. The pair developed the brief through workshops with Allianz and Women’s Aid. They then researched every aspect of the topic, including harrowing case studies and testimonials.
What struck them was how often previous domestic violence campaigns focus on images of the women as visibly bruised and battered. That, they felt, overly portrayed women in such circumstances as being helpless and powerless. They decided to take a different tack, highlighting that not alone was help available, but that in fact women coping in such circumstances are incredibly strong.
“We wanted to flip that and show the world’s strongest women, the bravest, most resilient women, whose strength is in surviving,” says Rice. “It takes an incredible amount of strength to get through the things these women go through. Simply calling Women’s Aid for help involves an incredible amount of strength.”
The pair worked closely with Women’s Aid to make sure the tone and messaging was precisely right. The campaign, which runs online and on TV, will play in the run up to Christmas, another time when, unfortunately, the incidence of domestic violence tends to rise.
Whether for brands or for society, good advertising can effect change. “We are so proud to be involved in this,” says McCleary, “Because it has the power to make such a difference.”
Ireland: where Creative is Native is an IAPI initiative to promote Ireland as a Centre of Excellence for the commercial creativity industry.
Ireland is a country where being creative is second nature; world-renowned for its writers, artists, poets, musicians and all-round change-makers. These talents spill into the commercial creative world of advertising, design and communications.
IAPI believe that the time has never been more opportune for the sector to grow their international reach. For brand owners looking to launch into the European market, Ireland is now a viable and agile alternative, aside from being the only English-speaking country left in the EU.
No longer do brand marketers seek creative expertise abroad as they know they can work with the global best, right here in Ireland. Domestic and International brands such as An Post, AIB, Vodafone, SuperValu, Allianz, Nissan, Lidl, Jameson, Diageo and Toyota and many others are creating world beating communications using Irish creative and media agencies.
Discover IAPI’s Creative is Native initiative - www.creativeisnative.com
