Building Campaigns That Last

There comes a time in a marketer’s career in which they will be tasked with unearthing a “Big Brand Idea.”

BBIs are not just any regular campaign. They need to have legs… for years. This means that the agency doing this work needs to think bigger than just achieving results, it needs to put a stake on the ground and proclaim at the top of their lungs that brand’s position in the market.

Oftentimes these platforms, as we will call them here, will yield campaigns for 3, 5, 10, sometimes more than 25 years. And this is what makes them different than campaigns.

But how do ad agencies go about digging up these timeless nuggets and putting them to work for their client’s brand?

Enter the world of human truths.

Every campaign needs an insight — a nugget that will be the jumping off point for creatives to draw ideas from. These short and plain-English sentences live at the intersection of three truths: the human truth, the category truth, and the brand truth.

Human truths are are fundamental insights into human behavior, emotions, and motivations. They tend to be universal and timeless, transcending cultural and demographic boundaries.

Category truths are insights specific to a particular industry or product category. They reflect the common perceptions, beliefs, or behaviors that consumers have regarding that category.

Brand truths are authentic and unique truths about a brand itself. They are the core values, attributes, and characteristics that define a brand's identity and differentiate it from competitors.

The combination of the three is where strategists place their finger on and ask creatives to bring it to life.

Take the following, for example:

• Society is one sleepwalking groupthink bubble, but for those brave enough to challenge the status-quo, amazing things await.

• Athletics and fitness aren’t reserved to only an exclusive few, we all have it within us.

• The absence of milk is its biggest selling point.

As you can probably guess, the above — Apple, Nike, and California Milk Processor Board, respectively — have been known to yield to some of the most iconic campaigns ever. And not only that, these campaigns actually became these illusory platforms that every brand manager chases.

What makes them so good isn’t the fact that their products are amazing (although that helps), but the fact that they placed the consumer at the centre of the narrative.

The beauty of leaning more heavily into the human truth instead of the other two truths, is that it gives your campaign the potential to outlast its time.

Humans are pre-historic beings living in modern times — they haven’t changed all that much in a million years and likely won’t change much for the next million years.

Therefore, unlike category and brand truths which can change in as little as a few months (take the impact of the COVID Pandemic, for example), human truths have lasting power.

For example, before the combustion engine was invented, the transportation category was predominantly led by horses. Companies that sold horses felt pretty safe about their position in the market because there was no other alternative to them, and human beings needed to get around.

But then came Karl Benz, who invented the first automobile in 1885, and changed the course of history forever. New brands came to be, the transportation category was changed overnight, but the fundamental need to “get around” remained the same.

But we don’t need to look that far back to see how categories change. Blockbuster vs Netflix, cable vs streaming, search vs AI chatbots. Things are changing all around us all the time, but what always remains the same are our stubborn selves.

So, how do we uncover these human truths?

Look no further than what’s right beneath your nose.

The need for belonging, love, and achievement, or our fears, insecurities, and prejudices are all sources of human truths. Of course, when leaning into negative emotions, such as the latter part of that sentence, marketers need to tread very carefully. But oftentimes those are the places where the strongest insights come from.

By design, human beings don’t pay much attention to when things are going well. It’s like watching a movie without a conflict — without it, "The Lord of the Rings" would be a whimsical tale where Frodo and Sam embark on a leisurely road trip to Mount Doom, only to find it's now a popular tourist spot for hobbits, elves, and dwarves to roast marshmallows and sing karaoke.

Booooring.

We need action, baby. We need some sh*t to go down. That’s what keeps us engaged and catches our attention.

Therefore, marketers need to think with their guts and not their brains when trying to uncover these human truths.

They need to take a walk down a busy street, observe shoppers at a grocery store, listen to the latest music, read the classics, pick up the phone and call their grandma. The sources for timeless insights are all around us and they don’t involve a single pie chart or focus group.

The temptation to go down data rabbit holes to find trends and outliers is a slippery slope for even the most self-aware strategists.

But make no mistake, data should be used to validate preconceptions, and not to explore new ideas. By definition datasets are backward looking and while there are forecasters for just about everything under the sun nowadays, just ask an economist for their economic outlook for next year. If the Bank of Canada can’t say for sure what will happen, neither can you, Skippy.

So, here’s the bottom line — great platforms are built on human truths. These truths will give creatives enough rope to tell stories about a brand a gazillion different ways on how they can help consumers resolve their conflicts within the context of their ever changing categories.

But the key remains keeping the consumer the centre of the story. Deviate from that and you risk launching a campaign that won’t resonate in a few months from now.

As the great Bill Bernbach once said: “The more intellectual you grow, the more you lose the great intuitive skills that really touch and move people.”

PPA