1) Brands demanding more digital content – faster and for less money. This year was a tipping point. The metrics are telling clients they simply can’t get the impressions they want via television anymore. TV is still powerful, but for youth brands, in particular, reach is a real challenge. On Taco Bell and Dr Pepper, we’re doing more content, like promoted ads on Facebook and Twitter than ever before. In fact, on Taco Bell, there wasn’t a single assignment where this kind of content wasn’t a deliverable.
2) We’re building out our in-house production department (Steelhead) at Deutsch LA, giving us the ability to produce more content, faster. And we’ve had to shift our thinking to understand how advertising has to behave in these very different environments like Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter. These are radically different canvases, each with different rules, different attention spans and wholly different best practices.
The kids we’re hiring now, simply live and breathe this stuff and see opportunities in this space that I think only digital natives can see. For example, Ken Slater and Andy Pearson, two of our Taco Bell CDs, heard there was going to be a taco emoji and seized on it by inventing the “Taco Emoji Engine”. It rewarded Taco Bell fans for tweeting the new taco emoji + any other emoji with a funny animation or gif from Taco Bell. In the end, we made over 700 original gifs and animations. And this is how we continue to engage and entertain Taco Bell’s fans, despite the fact that they’re watching less TV than ever.
3) Our Breakfast Defectors campaign for Taco Bell. We did a 3-minute film called the “Routine Republic”, which portrayed McDonalds as a bleak breakfast empire, complete with sinister clown police, kiddle-land ballpit moats and, of course, the same old bland breakfast sandwiches. The film had Hollywood film-like scale and director, Michael Spiccia, really killed it. It was the kind of effort you might expect from a video game brand, but it was for a fast food company, which made it very ambitious. To pull it off, we shot in Budapest over four days, in the middle of winter. This posed some challenges as the film concludes with the heroes escaping to a warm, sunny, green Californian hillside Spanish town which was metaphor for Taco Bell. It rained the day we shot that particular scene, but somehow it all worked out.
4) Make more stuff – better and faster. Oh, and for cheaper.
