This is the third in a series of musings about work I’ve done that I loved, and what I loved about it. This is totally not self-indulgent, moderately self-promotional blather about stuff maybe no one cares about — it’s about finding things to love in your work, or whatever, and being inspired by what you do and stuff. Totally that.
The work: A campaign selling spicy ginger ale to bars
This is not an “article about an AIDS researcher” kind of deal, where I found myself deeply inspired by something one might not find inspiring, or a “video for a children’s foster home” kind of deal, stewarding vulnerable children and a deeply important, meaningful message. I think this project — selling a spicy ginger ale to bars, a little sneakily — is clearly identifiable as fun just by looking at it. But even the most lighthearted projects that lend themselves to the most fun have to be taken seriously — we can have fun, and I happen to think creative work turns out better if you do have fun, and certainly in cases like this, we want the audience to have fun, but we also have a responsibility to ourselves and our teammates and our clients to take it seriously and focus on the outcome.
In this case? The outcome was that, with the help of this campaign, Buffalo Rock flipped three establishments during Birmingham Restaurant Week, which, if you’re not familiar with the industry, is a coup. And with the help of the website and the strategically crafted Amazon listing, they sold out their online-sales stockpile within weeks and had to do a special bottling run, which they again sold out in weeks. Notwithstanding this beloved spicy ginger ale’s ability to move itself, this campaign moved weight.
Why I Loved It:
It’s a fun campaign — not just because of the fun subject, but because the funnest projects make their own fun.
The client trusted us.
The agency-client (or freelance creative-client) relationship is crucial to building an effective campaign. (Yeah, I know, super-spicy hot take.) With this project, the client wanted to sneak around the brand exclusivity agreements locking down most bars and restaurants by promoting it as a mixer instead. The client came in and said, “We need this thing,” and we said, “We want to talk about getting drunk and being hung over and stuff, and we believe it will not be off-brand,” and the client said, “Go for it.” Creative teams are hardly perfect, and I’ve certainly covered enough questionable creative output to make that clear, but when backed by solid strategy and a comprehensive brief, they’re usually able to come up with good stuff. I love, “Go for it,” but I also love, “I’m honestly not sure about this, but I trust you and I’m going to let you cook.” The creative freedom is great, but carrying around the knowledge that your client trusts you, your judgement, and your creative abilities is equally inspiring, if not more so.
I got to play with my friends.
I love collaborating with a creative team. It’s the thing I missed most when I left agency life to freelance full-time, and being able to integrate with and collaborate with a client’s existing creative team is always such a thrill for me. Regardless of the topic about which we’re ideating, getting together with other creatives and cutting our brains loose to generate ideas that are both creative and effective is, at the risk of hyperbolizing, a mite bit exhilarating, and being able to do that on a project that’s as susceptible to fun as this one was makes it even better. There’s an inherent joy in opening up your brain and being hugely creative with other creatives, and that joy isn’t about the subject of the campaign — it’s about the people you’re working with and the freedom you’re working with to use all the parts of your brain.
It was out of my ordinary.
I mean, yes, of course, playing with booze for professional purposes was fun. But also, I’d never gotten to develop cocktails before.* I’ve done tons of posters and coasters and print ads, but this was the first time I got to brainstorm the perfect local bar to pair with each cocktail for on-location photo shoots (and then help style the cocktails for the shoot). We, as creatives, can get so accustomed to bringing uniqueness to the same elements of every campaign that working with elements that are already kind of unique was by itself a lot of fun. (Other favorites? A campaign that included an antique airplane, and another with a social component that involved lying on the sidewalk to trace out chalk outlines in front of ad agencies.) Also, at the risk of violating the inviolable Advertising “We,” I came up with the Gingerslap holiday punch from scratch and am extremely proud of both the recipe and the awesome name.
(All that said: If you’ve ever been to a wine tasting and been too self-conscious to spit out the wine after you taste it, you understand why a spit bucket would have been helpful during the development-and-testing process. iykyk)
For ultimate creativity, let creatives be creative.
I guess for this one, the takeaway is one for the creative directors and the CMOs and whatever, and clients, too: Let your creatives cook.
- Hire creatives you can trust to come up with big, wild ideas that are still effective and on-brand, and then let them do that.
- Encourage creativity by making room for creativity — let your creative team start out with basically no guardrails, and then bring in the guardrails to help hone and perfect their concept.
- Remember you can always pull the creative team back a little, if absolutely necessary, but you’re never going to get the really good stuff if you start with the safe stuff and try to punch it up.
- Unless you see something that will absolutely, without a doubt, lead to torches and pitchforks, give them a chance to show you what’s possible.
I’m not going to pretend this campaign was huge and risky and subversive or anything — Ooh, they reference booze and hangovers, someone call AdWeek — but it was something new and different for this client and this legacy brand. And it worked because they were willing to say, “Sure, go for it, you’ve never let us down before.”
Chaser.
And here’s a last thing, for the agency side: Banish “It’s not what we’ve done before” and “I don’t think the client is going to go for that” from your agency vocabulary. Few things kill creativity as instantly dead as those two phrases. Give the team room to come up with something awesome, and then you find a way to sell it to the client. It’s good for the client, because they get work that’s really going to work, and it’s good for your team, because they get to use their full brain and trust that it’s okay to do that. And it’s fun.
Cut them loose and watch them go. Spice up your creative as with, I mean, just for example, off the top of my head, the Southern spice of Buffalo Rock Ginger Ale.