We are back! After a short hiatus, the Weekly Round-Up is back in business and bringing you more industry insights than ever before. This week we take a look at an initiative fighting to end sexual harassment in the industry, a health food rivalry turned bitter, and the ridiculous amount of plastic we are digesting on a weekly basis. All that and more, in the Weekly Round-Up.
Drawing the Lion
Arguably the world’s biggest creative communications festival, Cannes Lions will be held in the French Riviera town next week. Over the five days, attendees will hear the industry’s best and brightest speak messages of creativity, innovation, and this year, inappropriate and harmful behaviour. timeTo, an initiative created by industry bodies NABS, WACL, and the Advertising Association, is working to end sexual harassment in the industry. This year, they’re taking their "Where Do You Draw The Line?" campaign to Cannes. Created by London agency, Lucky Generals, the campaign will be made visible to festival goers using a mix of OOH, online, and an impactful short film created by Steve Reeves. timeTo will be addressing the situations and scenarios in which this harassment can occur.
Founding partner at Lucky Generals, Helen Calcraft, believes that promoting their message at the festival will heighten the impact of the campaign, "Cannes is a unique industry moment where we see the best of creativity the industry has to offer alongside some of the most appalling behaviour.”
To date, the initiative has been endorsed by 204 companies.
Kind of catty
From the Pepsi Challenge to the Audi/BMW chess game, brand wars are nothing new in the advertising world. For a brand, these activities are supposed to be strategic marketing moves as opposed to senseless snide remarks and yet, something about their execution still makes them seem a little petty. This is particularly true if the aggressive brand is one which, in name and in nature, pertains to be kind.
As part of their latest campaign, "Be Kind to Yourself", Kind, a nutrition bar brand, looks to go after Clif, a rival in the health food space. In the creative, Kind calls out Clif for its products’ high sugar content and discourages consumers from indulging. The video is a response to an earlier campaign from Clif Bar who took out ads in The New York Times calling for Kind to start using organic ingredients. A bitter row over natural (or not so natural) sweetness, we look forward to Clif’s response.
Put your money where your mouth is
Or rather, don’t, according to WWF and Grey who, in their latest creative campaign, Your Plastic Diet, claim that we are unknowingly ingesting a credit card amount of plastic a week. Sprinkled on our food, swimming in our water, and living in our air are tens of thousands of tiny pieces of plastics, 2,000 of which we are consuming on a weekly basis. Warning us about this unsavoury snack we are consuming, the wildlife NGO will run a campaign across TV, digital, online, and OOH, nudging viewers to visit a website which allows users to quantify the amount of plastic they consume and how to reduce it. The campaign will run in several countries like Singapore, Australia, Japan, Columbia, Mexico, Germany, and the UK.
Pinner, Pinner, Chicken Dinner
Despite its almost 10 year existence and close to 300 million users, as social media platforms go, Pinterest still remains a little elusive as a tool for marketers. Some use it, some utilise it, and others ignore it completely, hoping that it will just be a decade long fad that won’t stick or pin. However, considering this big brand partnership, it would seem that the vision board facilitator won’t be going anywhere fast. Last August, IKEA made the bold move of moving its iconic catalogue online via Pinterest and, almost a year on, the Swedish outfit has seen a serious uptake in interested pinners with 25,000 boards created since the launch. Dubbing Pinterest the home of “DIYers and how-to-ers and customizers,” Ikea media project manager, Kerri Longarzo, said that this was a valuable audience that the furniture store wanted to reach. And, though she didn’t reveal the figures, Longarzo said that the conversion figures via Pinterest have been extremely successful to date. But who will really reap the benefits of this strategy? As a disruptive brand, IKEA has long been a trailblazer in the market, so no doubt if they see success with Pinterest, others will follow suit and perhaps the platform’s elusiveness will finally fade.
Why do your customers buy?
The age-old question of both brands and agencies, The Behaviours Agency believe they have uncovered a silver bullet, answering the question as to “Why consumers buy” and, better still, why they don’t. In a recent piece for online publication, Marketing Week, the Manchester-based agency who have built their brand on their knowledge of behavioural science, list the seven key reasons that make us go buy and go bye. Among the reasons are the obvious ones, ease – “People buy the simplest option” and social conformity “People buy what the crowd buy”. More interesting though is the point “People buy what will gratify them now” which pertains to the notion that we are only invested in looking after our current selves when buying. Our future selves are strangers and are not brought into consideration. To read on and find out how you can nudge your consumers towards a purchase, check out the full piece here.