The Golden Treacle Tin Awards!

At RPM's last company meeting, our Head of Creative, Neil Hooper, handed out four Golden Treacle Tin awards to the Best Design and the Best Creative of the quarter. The nominations were taken from all of RPM's projects over the year, and the competition was steep!

The Golden Treacle Tin awards recognise excellence for RPM's creative department, with the winners receiving a £50 bar tab at the local pub. So, to the winners...

Coming joint first for Best Creative were the world-first Talisker Sail-in Cinema and the Johnnie Walker experience at Goodwood Revival, the latter celebrating the extraordinary life of Rob Walker. Awarded Best Design was Sky Arts at the Hay Festival, which aimed to encourage consumers to find their hidden talent through a den full of inspirational items.

The Recruitment Battle

Nicola Clark's article, 'Is Marketing facing a talent crisis', in this week's Marketing Magazine really resonated with us. We understand how important it is to welcome in original minds and passionate creative talent to any workplace and have found that our annual grad scheme is a brilliant way of doing just this. After a competitive recruitment day in August, we took on four new grads ready to give all they'd got to the agency, working on a rota within our Production and Account Team departments.

The consultancy McKinsey, quoted in Nicola's piece, speaks correctly when it says, 'if you sit still, the talent won't simply come to you'. As an example of a more proactive recruitment strategy, in 2010 our Creative department launched a recruitment drive called 'Catch A Creative'. This encouraged people to recommend a friend who specialised in either design, copywriting, artwork or illustration. If they were employed, the friend who recommended them would receive a cash reward.

This was very effective for both parties. For us, there were no huge fees from recruitment agencies and it became a PR stunt. For the public, it gave people that extra incentive to participate. Everyone wants cash, right? In true guerrilla style, we had staff putting up posters in cafes, phone boxes, pubs and lampposts throughout East London wearing red 'Catch a Creative' T-shirts and carrying huge nets. The whole campaign roused attention because it was different, and we had over 100 applications.

I think originality is the key to the recruitment battle; do something different when it comes to securing new talent, and the talent will see that you're creative, unique and passionate about getting new individuals to join your team.

Ensuring Efficiency in Traditional Digital Channels

Dave Squires, RPM's Head of Digital, believes that when it comes to new technology, effectiveness lies in the old and not necessarily the new....

When it comes to exploring new technologies, it's often the case that clients will push to come up with the next idea, when actually less detail is paid to perfecting the basics, leading to a flawed campaign.

We’re all guilty of getting caught up in the ‘what’s next’ culture without stopping to actually review the traditional technology channels and the benefits they have. What clients tend to forget is that a lot of the traditional methods and channels, the tried and tested ones, are actually the most effective.

When looking at mobile solutions, for example, instead of thinking about apps or QR codes, a channel as basic as a text message is probably the most effective means of communication through mobile. This makes sense. People have more access to text messages than anything else. QR codes are good, but they’re not as easily accessible and ultimately not as recognised nor understood as a text.

In terms of RPM's Digital department, this is how we get results. If you’re trying to promote a sound digital offering and a serious digital offering at that, I think reconsidering these older methods puts you in a great position; it shows you’ve got the confidence to pull yourself back from all these new technologies that don’t actually do anything in terms of building a community. It’s important to remember not to use new technology for the sake of it, and think about what the consumer wants.

Simon Couch in Retail Week

Great to see our Head of Retail, Simon Couch, in this week's Retail Week. In Simon's letter, he comments on the ways in which in-store innovations help and encourage impulse buying.

Rob Wilson Explores the Benefits of Pretesting

Rob Wilson, RPM's Strategy Director, addresses his experience with pretesting a campaign, leading to greater and more effective consumer engagement.

Pretesting is crucial for most big budget campaigns, and in order for it to be effectively qualitative, it has to be carried out with over 100 people. The real plus about pretesting is that it optimises the campaign and allows you to really focus on the value exchange between the brand and the consumer. You need to ask yourself why people participate in something and what would encourage them to participate, which all goes back to the fact that value exchange doesn’t have to be transactional; it can bring benefits that are more relational and emotional.

We did a lot of pretesting for the concepts behind our 2011 Sky Ride campaign. For those who aren't familiar, Sky Ride is a series of mass participation cycle events led by Sky and British Cycling, which encourage thousands of friends and families all over the UK to get back on their bikes and take to the traffic-free roads of their city. The pretesting for this was all about trying to find ideas and concepts that would actually trigger people’s emotional relationship with cycling. This is how we ended up going down the nostalgic route: ‘Where would your bike take you?’ The concept was all about getting people to remember that they once loved cycling and have had a connection with it since childhood.

If you sit lots of people in a room and ask how many people have played squash, you might get 20 or so, but once we'd asked how many people had ever ridden a bike, everyone had a connection with it through their childhood; thus, we took the nostalgic route. Pretesting was particularly useful with this insight.

The people we chose to do pretesting with were lapsed cyclists and people who cycle less than once a month. The process goes that we find them through research agencies (which our clients like us to use because they’re impartial), we put together the ideas, a moderator within the research group takes the people through it, and we watch them through a little glass mirror. It’s all very CSI!

What you’re looking for with pretesting is traction; so what gets people most excited, what do people have to instantly talk about and what ideas start making people open up and talk. In the case of Sky Ride, we put one idea in front of them that was less well-received, mainly because there was less instant conversation. As soon as we asked them to discuss their memories of riding a bike, however, people were engaged and eager to contribute and - voila - you have an idea with traction.

It’s important to take on board that pretesting is there for optimising ideas, not for making decisions for you. In other words, don’t make all your creative decisions based on your pretesting; use it to make your ideas better and don’t use them to rule out or discredit ideas. I say this because often ideas are harder to get until you’ve got the right execution, and you’re not testing execution at that stage. Don’t let consumers dictate what your brand should do; let them optimise ideas and work out how that idea should work for them.

At RPM, the scale of our campaigns and therefore scale of investment is going up, which means we’ll inevitably be doing more pretesting going forward. Furthermore, the nature of the work we’re doing is more digital and more and more engagement focused, which again reaffirms the benefits of pretesting.

Pretesting is ultimately about how a consumer gets involved in a campaign, and agencies should be using this to see exactly how the consumer would get involved, to what level they’d get involved, whether they would advocate your idea and whether they would take that extra crucial step and send it on to a friend.

Tim Jones to speak at YCC Event; Return of the Insight

Our Strategist, Tim Jones, will be speaking tonight at The Poke, London, in conjunction with creative group The Young Creative Council. The latter was set up to help start-ups in the creative and advertising industries and host a range of events featuring key industry figures to offer guidance and advice to those keen to learn about the industry. Tonight's event, 'The Return of the Insight', will address how important consumer insights are to successful campaigns and therefore overall engagement. Other speakers include William Humphrey, Asi Sharabi and Andy Whitlock.

On-Trade Activations Leave Consumers on a High

Neil Hooper, RPM's Head of Creative, explores how on-trade experiences can lead to consumer engagement and a unique drinking experience.

We all know that having a brand representative barge into a bar to put on a show could be perceived as tacky, especially by UK consumers. But having recently worked on the Captain Morgan's relaunch, I’ve experienced something totally different and really quite impactful.

RPM’s job has been to reposition ‘The Captain’ in the UK as the face of the brand. He’s always been there, yet consumers have never experienced him directly. So, the best way for them to associate The Captain with a captivating drinking experience was through equally captivating on-trade activations. It was important for us to recruit a Captain who encapsulated the spirit of the brand, which has up until now been led by the Global Brand Ambassador.

We needed to find six to eight Captains to run the campaign across the whole of the UK and have written his character type, the script and looked at the promotional campaign that then tours with them. We created a new look and feel, supported by POS, and helped relaunch Captain Morgan's Spiced in the UK.

In Europe, Diageo has had massive success by caricaturing The Captain as a party leader who then infiltrates bars for half an hour, hitting them all with samples and leaving them with that party spirit still riding high.

The J&B Mirror Man is another example of an effective on-trade activation. An arguably challenging idea at first, yet once you see and experience him in a bar environment - when the music blares out and he starts dancing - the bar totally transforms. Suddenly, everyone is drinking your product, taking photos and dancing on tables. He has a 30-minute impact and leaves drinkers with a wave of energy. It cleverly utilises high impact within a short time frame and has a lasting impact on consumers who begin associating your brand with an exciting, unique drinking experience.