By Adam Wakefield
Wagner, who flew up from Cape Town specifically to conduct the presentation at NATIVE VML’s Sandton offices, used the analogy of anatomy for his presentation, with neither a successful campaign or body being able to function without its constituent parts working together in community and harmony.
His first port of call was the heart.
“The heart, for me, is the most important part and that is the relationship we have with you our clients and our agency. If we don’t look after our heart, things become problematic,” Wagner told the packed room.
A true and healthy relationship between clients and agencies might have its weaknesses but ultimately that relationship has to be based on a true partnership.
There needs to be a “collective obsession with great work”, with the work put first. If a commitment is made, it needs to be stuck to and on occasion, both the client and the agency need to realise when they should get out of the way.
Ultimately, it is about having a level of trust “that won’t get you fired, and that is a very, very difficult thing to do”.
The next piece of the campaign anatomy was the brain, which is purpose driven and requires both the creative and strategic thinking sides to work in unison.
Wagner said advertising has moved into an era where interruption has gone out of the window, with consumers not wanting to have their “precious time” stolen from them with irrelevant marketing content.
“You have to create and add value, and that is something we strive to do. You have to have shared values with your customer as well.”
The spine was next, which related to strategic framework. Wager said the spine, as the strategic framework, is what an idea is built on. It has three elements, being overall business strategy, brand strategy, and communication strategy, with one strategy interconnected to the other.
The ears followed, with Wagner noting that “unfortunately, as marketers, we sometimes fail to listen to what our consumers are saying. Sometimes we get so obsessed with the customer need, we forget what the customer wants”.
“That is something that we really got to pay a lot of attention to if we want to create work that makes a difference,” Wagner said.
He then moved onto the eyes, which related to how data is interpreted. Advertisers must not see a customer as a single construct, but as different versions of the same person throughout the course of a day.
“It’s really about the moment we want to market into. We don’t’ want to create generic personas. We need to make sure we market to ‘Jane’ in the right moment,” he explained.
The nose was next, which was the intuition to run a campaign which was not based on logic or research but on a feeling that an idea will work.
“This can be a very scary place but it comes back to having trust with a client where you can push a bit extra and come up with something amazing,” Wagner said.
Below the nose is the mouth, which Wagner said was producing content with context, which was very important.
“We’ve got to stop interrupting the content that people are interested in and become the content that people are interested in,” Wagner told the room.
He then moved onto the arms, being tools and craft, that extra attention to detail which made work standout to the consumer.
Lastly, there were the legs, the moving of an idea, where thought is needed to get great ideas into the right spaces and places where they can be at their most effective.
Wagner then mused how sometimes the best laid plans do not work, no matter what you do, before ending with a quote illustrating the interdependency of the different parts of a successful campaign: “Integration has become the new creativity”.