I recently participated in an event hosted by BBDOsf for junior planners, where they gave out three client briefs over three weeks, one a week, and aspiring planners were asked to come up with a creative brief that could be posted to Twitter. In other words, the brief had to be shorter than 140 characters. It also had to contain the hashtag #briefbrief, the name of the event, and be addressed to @bbdosf, all of which are counted against the character count, of course. The event ended on the 11th of March, and now that the event is over and talking about it is unlikely to compromise the integrity of the 140 character limit imposed by the #briefbrief, I wanted to write a blog post about my experience with the event, what I learned, and the thought process I went through while thinking strategically about each of the briefs that got me from big ideas to a single tweet. So without further adieu, the briefs!
The first challenge was centered around the city of Sochi. In short, the client brief was that the tourism association of Sochi was looking for an advertising campaign to ensure that their goals for turning Sochi into a desirable destination after the Olympics became a reality.
As any good planner should, I started with research. I discovered interesting things about Sochi’s relationship with sports. As most people know, they just finished hosting the Winter Olympics. Fewer people know they are constructing a Formula One circuit that is being added to the F1 season starting this year. Even fewer know they won the bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018. I also dug into why Sochi was a popular destination for Russians, despite being largely ignored by the rest of the world. It sits on a part of the Black Sea known as the Russian Riviera for its glitzy reputation and available beaches. It was the favored winter home of the Russian government during several administrations. It has the rare pleasure of being a tropical resort town with a winter playground only an hour or two away. For the more cultured, it has several quality museums, parks, and other attractions, including a UNESCO site. Finally, it is the most culturally diverse city in Russia.
I also researched why people travel to cities that have housed world famous sporting events, after the events are over. Did they go to see where history was made? Did they go to see the incredible venues that were constructed? The Olympics are like a World’s Faire, in that the host nation is doing their best to show everyone what they’ve got and what makes them special. Is that part of the appeal? Ultimately, what I realized talking to people about why they had visited other former Olympic venues, as well as other major world sporting venues, was that they didn’t go to see where the Olympics happened. They went to do normal tourist things, but their awareness of the city as a viable tourist destination increased because of watching the Olympics. It was this insight that I decided to base my strategy on.
I started by writing a long brief, which I haven’t included here, using a rough template that I learned at Miami Ad School. Most of that wasn’t core to the brief, so the first thing I did was take only the most salient points and boil them down into a single, short paragraph. When developing the creative idea that would tie the insight to the campaign execution, I made sure to land hard on the insight, and pull in what I knew attracted Russians to Sochi, as well as the limited outsiders who chose to visit there as well.
Short Brief:
People don’t go to former Olympic venues because they want to see where the Olympics happen, because most people just aren’t that into sports. They go to former Olympic venues because they have cool stuff to see and do in addition to seeing the old Olympic venues. Sochi’s appeal with Russians has always been the weather, culture, and local attractions, the same things that could attract foreigners.
I wasn’t completely happy with this brief, and obviously it was too long, so while shortening up the verbiage I also tightened up the presentation of the core ideas.
Shorter Brief:
Olympics shmolympics. Tourists want attractions and old sports venues, while nice, aren’t enough. Focus on Sochi’s cultural diversity, years of history, interesting nightlife, and convenient access to both tropical beaches and snowcapped mountains that made it a destination for Russian leaders from Stalin to Putin.
Now that I was happy with this level of concise brief, I had to make cuts until it fit under 140 characters, which you can see evolving in the following versions of the brief. As this was a challenge for planners, I felt it was important that, throughout the cuts, the core strategic insight “tourists want more than sports venues” carried through every revision. Incidentally, I think the 280 character version of this brief is my favorite, and it killed me that I had to lose the poetry of the piece in order to get under the character limit.
280 Character Brief:
Olympics shmolympics. Tourists want more than old sports venues. Focus on Sochi’s cultural diversity, interesting attractions, and access to both tropical beaches and snowcapped mountains that made it a favorite of Russian leaders from Stalin to Putin.
180 Character Brief:
Tourists want more than old sports venues. Focus on Sochi’s cultural diversity, interesting attractions, and access to tropical beaches and snowy mountains.
140 Character Brief:
@bbdoSF #briefbrief Tourists want more than sports venues. Focus on cultural diversity, attractions, access to both beaches and mountains.
The second challenge was centered around the convergence of two fictional companies: Juicy and Pokeface. Juicy is an online dating site that is gaining traction amongst the younger demographics. Pokeface is the world’s largest social network. Pokeface is looking to make a foray into online dating through purchasing Juicy. The client brief was to consider a communications message to prime the market for the merger, with a focus on the one idea or concept consumers should take away about the benefits of such a merger.
To research this one, I thought back to stories people had shared with me about their online dating experiences. I thought about what they had enjoyed, and what they had hated. I also visited some of the biggest and most popular sites, like OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and eHarmony, and got some first hand experience with what the process of hunting for a date online was like. I also became fascinated with the stigma of online dating. I read people’s blogs about their opinions on online dating. I read articles about the statistics on online dating: how many people did it, how many people talked about it openly, and so on. I also read opinion pieces about why online dating was often looked down upon.
There are certainly negatives to the online dating world. People can lie. They can lie about their age, their weight, their appearance, and even their gender. There are rarely ways to check if the person you are meeting with is weird or creepy, what they are looking for in a relationship, and other personality traits. And, of course, there is the stigma itself to contend with. Even though there is growing acceptance to the idea of using online dating sites to find potential partners, it remains something used by less than 50% of the “single and looking” population, according to the Pew Research Center. And, even though that might sound like a large number, one must also consider that, again according to Pew, only 20% of web users trust online dating, 8% less than last year.
I also gave some thought to who would be most attracted to online dating. Online dating certainly has its niche appeal. It is great for people with limited time, since it takes a lot of the time-consuming process of finding eligible partners out of the equation. It also works great for people who have less access to the traditional means of meeting new people; they work alone, have a small social group, live in a small town, and or face other hindrances. It also has the reputation of being for people who are desperate, but other then being useful as a non-judgmental fallback plan if other methods fail, I wasn’t able to uncover anything about online dating that was more or less advantageous for those who were ‘desperate’. Ultimately, there is a lot to hate about online dating, but much of that is shared with how hard it is to make a connection with a random person at a bar.
With all of this in mind, I noticed two key ideas that germinated into the core of my strategy. The first was the insight that the process of online dating was dehumanizing. It took something that was supposed to be one of the most personal things you do, creating a romantic bond with someone, and stripped it of its humanity. Most of the popular sites function more like eBay or Amazon than anything else. When creating a profile, you put up a picture or a handful of pictures, which act like product shots. Then you put up a short description of yourself, which is akin to a product description. When people are looking for someone to make a connection with, they pour over potentially hundreds of profiles looking for ones that catch their fancy. On top of that, the interface is often laid out like an online marketplace. You can put in criteria to filter the listings down to the specifics you are looking for, such as an age range and distance away from you, in the same way you can filter TVs on NewEgg based on screen size and display technology (LCD vs. Plasma). While it is important to make sure that age peers, complimentary sexualities, and unreasonable commute distances are all handled correctly, the interfaces of these sites are often too reminiscent of online shopping. This takes the whole idea of a meat market to a new level.
The second came from thinking about the way people seemed to be most happy meeting new people: the set-up. A mutual friend arranges for two people to go on a blind date, and hopefully they hit things off. This feels right to people because it relies on your friends, the people who know you really well. They know what you like in a potential date, they know your interests and hobbies, they know where you stand on big issues like religion and kids, they know how serious you are looking to take a relationship, and they know all of your pet peeves, like how you will dump a girl if she doesn’t think Caddy Shack is funny. Friends are also looking out for you, so the fact that they are acting as the intermediary gives a feeling of safety to the potential dates. They know that this person they trust has vouched for the other person in the blind date, so it is way less likely that they are creepy, weird, socially awkward, rude, or any other major deal-breakers.
The beauty of what Pokeface can offer is that it can use its tools and its immense data collection to do many of the things that your friends would do in setting you up, on a much larger scale, more effectively, and with greater accuracy. Do you consider similar tastes in art and culture important to a future relationship? Pokeface can use the movies, television, and books you list as favorites on your profile to create a taste profile and limit your potential matches to other people who match that profile. Do you value a well-educated partner? Pokeface could use profile information about schools and degrees to match you with similar levels of academic achievement. Worried about meeting totally random strangers? Pokeface could limit your matches to only friends of friends. And so on. The best part about this is that, excepting a few touch points about what you value in a match, all of the dehumanizing profile filtering that makes it feel like online shopping can be done under the hood.
With these two core elements of my strategy in mind, I took to writing the brief. Similar to how I approached Sochi, I started with a longer paragraph that encapsulated what I wanted to convey in the final Tweet, and then looked for ways to shorten up to the required length.
Short Brief: Online dating is a dehumanizing meat market. Prospective partners comparison shop for dates using pictures (product shots) and short profiles (product descriptions). The value added in a Juicy + Pokeface merger is that, like an old village matchmaker, it can use the “real you” from your social media profile to match you with people like you and/or match you only with people with whom you share mutual friends.
While I really liked the short brief, it was obviously way too long, so many things had to be cut. I wanted to preserve the insight (online dating is dehumanizing) and needed to cut the idea down to a much more manageable number of characters. This meant losing most of the friend set-up and village matchmaker imagery in order to keep the post concise, while maintaining the idea that the Pokeface network can serve the same purpose.
220 Char Brief: Online dating is dehumanizing. Pokeface + Juicy have the tools to make online dating human again. Your network, your profile, your likes, and your posts can all help connect you with compatible dates.
More trimming gets the message down to its barest bones for the final tweet, mostly by restructuring the sentences to take up fewer characters.
140 Char Brief: @bbdosf Online dating dehumanizes. PF/Juicy can make it human again. Your network, profile, likes, etc. all help make a match. #briefbrief
The final challenge was for a non-profit in San Francisco called 826 Valencia. They are a really unique organization that is part publishing house, part pirate-themed storefront, and part after school tutoring center. Their largest focus is on promoting literacy amongst the youth of the Mission District in San Francisco. Their methods have been extremely successful, and have spread to other locations around the United States such as Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York. Their desire was for a low budget campaign that would bring in volunteers to help staff their programs. It was also their desire that the campaign idea would take advantage of the work that the students were already producing as part of the writing programs the center provides.
I had a distinct advantage for this challenge, since in my life pre-advertising I had worked as both an in-house tutor and as an after school program lead. I have also worked with kids as a volunteer at a summer camp for many years, teaching them swimming, canoeing, and a variety of basic woodsman’s skills. I started my research process by digging deep and thinking about what I had enjoyed about working with kids. Then I thought about all the things I hated about working with kids.
I also know a large number of people who volunteer their time to various youth groups. I know many people who took on leadership roles in Boy Scouts of America well past when their own kids aged out of the program. I know people who have worked as ESL tutors, mentors with High School robotics teams, and more. I also have close personal friends that are schoolteachers. These all represent, each in their own unique ways, a commitment to helping the development of children. I thought back to all the conversations I’d had with these people where they shared information about their experiences with kids: what they loved, what they hated, and what motivated them to keep at it.
Taking all of this personal experience, and combining it with exhaustive online research on what teachers, volunteers, and others say about working with kids, I started to notice some interesting trends and patterns. One in particular that caught my attention was the disconnect between what people say about working with kids and what working with kids is really like. One quote I found on a YahooAnswers thread about working with kids sums up nicely the naïve views about what people value in the experince: “Where else can you work where you work with people who don’t judge you… Love you as you are… Make you smile everyday… Have the ability to make you laugh and cry all in the same breath (like a best friend would)… Let you remember how to have mindless fun….” And maybe that is what this person really believes. But it doesn’t ring true with my experiences, or many of the experiences of my friends, or what people reveal online. If you ask people why they work with kids, this is the kind of answer you will typically get. When you ask people to tell you about their most recent time working with kids, there is always an undercurrent to their stories of how difficult kids are to work with. Kids are always testing how much they can get away with before they get disciplined. Kids are aggressively judgmental and tend towards developing cliques; bullying is not a learned behavior. To do your job effectively, you often have to answer to two or three bosses; you want the kids to be happy so they get the most out of your teaching, you want the parents to be happy so they buy into the idea that this is good for their kids, and you want your actual boss (the department head, principle, program coordinator, etc.) to be happy so they will support you if things don’t go smoothly. Basically, working with kids can be a real nightmare. So why do people bother?
At the core of all of the accounts of working with kids I read, listened to, or even experienced myself, was the importance of a rare moment so rewarding that it made the whole experience worth it. I chose to call this the “Ah-Ha!” moment. It’s that point where the kid you are teaching reaches a true breakthrough in whatever they are learning and suddenly “gets it.” If it’s an academic subject, it might be that they finally see the pattern that they have been missing which makes the subject make sense; the rules of algebra suddenly make sense because they have cracked how basic arithmetic lets you balance an equation to solve for X. If it’s a non-academic subject, it could be when they finally come to appreciate what is being taught at a level where the pupil can see why the teacher is so passionate about it; a soccer coach sees his team start succeeding once he gets his young players to understand how fluid ball movement is important to playing the game at its highest level.
The final piece of the puzzle was to consider what the 826 Valencia brand offered in this space. Was there something about 826 Valencia that would offer a more enjoyable volunteer experience than other opportunities to work with kids? There are certainly things 826 Valencia does differently that makes them stand out. The kids come to the center of their own free will, which means that they rarely have to be coerced to participate in the activities of the center. It also is open and appealing to everyone, and therefore avoids some of the stigma such centers have of being only for people who are dumb, or need specific help. They also have the kids work on publishable writing as part of their literacy efforts, which gives the kids a specific goal to strive for. Of course, this work is what 826 Valencia wanted to use as the foundation of the campaign, and serendipitously, it also represents a big reason why someone would pick them as a place to volunteer.
Knowing that I wanted to include both the insight (that working with kids was rewarding for the “Ah-Ha!” moment) and the idea (using the works the kids have produced, such as early drafts evolving into publishable works), I set to work crafting my brief. As with every brief thus far, I started with a longer paragraph and edited down to a Tweetable length. As you can tell, by the third one I was starting to get much better at being concise from the very beginning.
Short brief: Despite what volunteers say in public, kids are difficult. But teaching them is worth it for getting them to that Ah-ha! moment. 826 Valencia’s focus on publishable writing projects gives the tutoring a goal-oriented program that engages kids and gives focus to getting them to “ah-ha!” The writing process, from draft to final project, can be used to illustrate the path to “ah-ha!” as well.
The first edit I made was to drop the idea of including the process of going from draft to final published project from the brief. This was, after all, a planning challenge and that piece was far more execution than strategy. Specifics like that could happily be left to the creative team, and therefore shouldn’t take up valuable space in the Tweeted brief.
200 Char: Kids are difficult, but teaching them is worth it for that Ah-ha! moment. 826 V’s publishable writing projects give the tutoring a goal that engages kids to get them to that “ah-ha!”
170 Char: Kids are difficult, but teaching is worth it for the Ah-ha! moment. 826 V’s writing projects give the tutoring a goal that engages kids to get them to that “ah-ha!”
140 Char: @bbdoSF Kids are difficult, but tutoring is worth it for ah-ha! moment. 826V gets kids to ah-ha! through chance to be published. #briefbrief