What’s the biggest takeaway or lessons learned from work (please identify the project) you were involved in that was or is in the running for current awards season consideration (i.e., Emmys, Cannes Lions, etc.)?
Last Week Tonight has won 20 Emmy’s and is nominated for 7 more. What was ENGINE’s contribution to this impressive recognition? Nothing. Well, as close to nothing as you could possibly get without being absolutely nothing.
Two years ago, we wrote a tweet comparing HBO shows to milk. Succession was 1% milk, Game of Thrones was giant’s milk, and so on. Was it silly? Sure. But it was clever and amused us, so we tweeted it, and completely forgot about it.
- https://twitter.com/HBO/status/1141704826570588160
Much to our surprise, two years later that silly milk tweet popped up on the current season of Last Week Tonight (season 8, episode 10, final segment). We were thrilled that one of the hundreds of tweets we wrote for @HBO suddenly reappeared in a whole new context. There are a few lessons or reminders to take away.
- Always-on content is always out there. A brand’s social feed is an honest and long-lasting representation of its persona, values and point of view.
- Craft matters on all levels, on all channels. Every tweet. Every post. Every piece of content doesn’t have to be expensive, but it should be good.
- Winning best brand on social is one of the toughest awards you can win. Next to 20 Emmy’s.
While gazing into the crystal ball is a tricky proposition, we nonetheless ask you for any forecast you have relative to content creation and/or the creative and/or business climate for the second half of 2021 and beyond.
The fusion of media and creative seems to be more important than ever. We’ve received many requests to help brands speed up their return to pre-pandemic revenue levels. Clients are looking for equal parts brand-building and measurable performance marketing, with aggressive timelines and constrained budgets. Many businesses that have been hurt by the pandemic don’t have the luxury of separating brand campaigns from direct sales. And they don’t have time or resources to manage inter-agency teams sequentially. Collaboration across creative, production and media must happen in parallel, much earlier in the creative development process. Companies in recovery need to move quicker than their competitors, which is an advantage to agencies with creative and media together in-house.
What are your goals, creatively speaking and/or from a business standpoint, for your company, division, studio or network in 2021?
What trends, developments or issues would you point to thus far in 2021 as being most significant, perhaps carrying implications for the rest of the year and beyond?
What work (advertising, entertainment)–your own or others–struck a responsive chord with you and/or was the most effective creatively and/or strategically so far this year? Does any work stand out to you in terms of meshing advertising and entertainment?
A few months into the pandemic, we pitched and won the Credible.com creative account by taking an entertainment-first approach. The brief asked for a spokesperson to deliver a list of RTBs in the crowded loan marketplace. We answered with an off-beat sitcom broken into 30 second episodes featuring an anthropomorphized bull that bucks (sorry about that) every familiar cliché. The Credibull (sorry again) has the intimidating look of a real bull, but he’s real a softie once you get to know him. He goes where humans go and does things humans do. He tends to underestimate his own size and strength but is polite and a bit sensitive to the negative connotations associated with bulls.
We didn’t start writing commercial scripts until we had a conceit that made us laugh. Then we fully developed the bull’s personality to be as nuanced and specific as someone we might know. Eventually, we wrote the scripts and left room for improv. We paired director Conor Byrne (m ss ng p eces) with editor Craig Deardorff (Cosmo Street) to capture the dry tone and normalize the absurdity. And we challenged animatronic veteran Robert DeVine (Anatomorphex) to build his most ambitious remote-controlled face, using 28 servos and 3 puppeteers to bring out the humanity in our benevolent beast. All along the way, we were supported and challenged by a smart marketing team at Credible that understood the power of entertainment in commercials.
