Technology ushers in an age of interactive advertising campaigns.

The Case of Cravendale

Has The interactive aspect to integrated campaigns altered the face of how the public relate to ads?

• On the previous slide, is a genuine customer response to the latest Cravendale campaign created by the agency Wieden and Kennedy London for Arla foods. The letter appeared on the blog of this agency and although it seems witty and perhaps tounge-in-cheek, what it serves to demonstrate is quite an interesting and recent phenomenon where the public are relating to advertising campaigns in a more involved manner as the way in which they are contsructed, and the consumer is expected to relate to them alters. I would argue that although the received format of the reactionary letter is well trodden territory with risque ad campaigns, this particular letter stands apart from such a genre as it goes further: it’s writer feels that he knows well enough how to make an appropriate advert for this brand; his criticism of the advertisers method seems almost as though he himself believes that he would do a more professional job himself. Since when and through what means have we entered an age where the public feel so close to advertising campaigns that they are prepared to appoint themselves as professionals and what are the reasons for this development?

• Firstly I want to site the example and examine the integrated campaign for Cravendale which I believe to be a successful campaign which exemplifies 360 degree thinking and translates splendidly across all the media platforms upon which it appears. The entire campaign in all it’s manifestations can be viewed online at: www.milkmatters.co.uk

• For 2007 Arla foods chose to change the agency responsible for handling their Cravendale milk advertising from DDB to Wieden and Kennedy, perhaps because W and K had already donework for their Lurpak butter brand. Louise Barton, senior brand manager for Cravendale said:

“As the Countries largest milk brand, Cravendale is taking a brand new approach this year, taking the fun, kooky personality of the brand to our customers with our new creatives, but firmly establishing our true brand benefit:

that Cravendale is filtered to make it purer.”

W +K decided to employ the work of Belgian animators Pic Pic Andre ( a duo ) through Nexus

productions in London to make a quirky set of stop frame animations in the same vein as the cultTV animation Panique Au Village. Instead of a cowboy, an Indian and a horse the commercials feature a cyclist, pirate and cow who will go to any lengths to get their hands on Cravendale milk.I think this is successful and a strong idea. Advertising for milk becomes startlingly unusual, fun, eccentric and most importantly noticeable. It is not just the unique animated style never before seen by a UK audience, but many aspects of the films making including what the characters are saying, the soundtrack by Little Richard and the infectious shouting of Milk Milk, that make these spots so amusing and fresh (like the milk) but also the bonkers plot lines and capers that our trio become involved in. The ads really are a novelty and I remember watching them on TV and wanting to know more about them.It is at this point that I would like to say that I believe the Campaign excels itself in 360 degree thinking as it doesn’t just stop at TV.

Posters

• The Campaign included posters where the creatives Frank Ginger and Sam Heath have clearly focused their strategy on the fact that Cravedale is the only milk that goes through a filtration process to remove the bacteria that makes milk turn sower more quickly.

Website• The website designed by unit 9, brings to life the

world of the adverts creating a rich media world which you can wander round, exploring a few areas finding goodies and making movies. At the same time you can also see who else is in the site although there is no interaction apart from the dancing.

• You can choose which character you want to be and each of them have some special moves- play with the keyboard to make your avatar dance. The sheep on a skateboard is fun, but the head standing cow is cool.

• There are goodies hidden around the site- find them and you get IM icons, wallpapers, desktop icons, mobile wallpapers and printable graphics for T shirts.

• There’s videos and images from the site, fun stuff to entertain you.

• If you invite your friends you all get to dance and play in a private setting of your own

• You can record movie clips of you dancing, edit them together and send that to your friends. In short you become the creator of your own version of the advert for an audience of your choice : it empowers you to be part of and therefore consider at length the creative process behind the campaign..

Also on the website…

• Aside from mobile phone ring-tones, the website has a very interesting section. Not only does it have a video clip : ‘The Making Of The Adverts’ taking us behind the scenes of the professional shoot to see interviews with the film-makers, but also a clip has been made to invite the viewer at home to have a go at making a stop-frame animation themselves. It demonstrates step by step from model making through to storyboarding, from lighting and set building through to shooting how the amateur can make such an ad in their own style from their home.

• It becomes no wonder that amateur adverts made purely ‘for the love’ are springing up all over you-tube these days when the agencies responsible for the most cutting edge campaigns are taking the arm chair enthusiast behind the scenes, showing them how straightforward a process is used and then equipping them with the ability to do it themselves!

• Finally there is a competition to win a fridge: participants are invited to submit a photo of their own personal moment of rage when they have run out of milk. It is called milk rage moment. A useful way to get people to really think about the ads plot.

“`The Cravendale world of the Pirate, Cow and Cyclist broke all category conventions. The brand grew 48% YOY, and most impressively penetration increased by 11.8%. The work has also enabled crucial new listings

for brand variants.”

• Clearly as a piece of communication the Cravendale campaign was a statistical success in promoting the brand and selling the product, but I want to look at how the internet has changed the face of advertising.

• 1. Suddenly your audience is the world: although the campaign is targeting the UK market there is no reason why some-one in the US for example, cannot interact with the Cravendale website.

• 2. You’re instantly track-able:TV ad’s are tough to track, but put a 40 second ad on to something like Youtube and you can see how many people actively clicked the play button, how quickly it spread and how well it was rated and- something that was unthinkable before- feedback from the ad’s viewers. I am certain the Cravedale website has a hit counter and they can monitor exactly how may people are on there making movies and sending them to their friends.

• 3 Nowadays there is a whole chunk of an ads potential audience who never watches TV or reads a magazine. Agencies have to work much harder to reach the same audience as it could have done with just TV only ten years previously. It is not just about money any-more: it is much more democratic: if the public don’t like an ad it just doesn’t get through. In my opinion Wieden and Kennedy are making a good stab at taking their campaigns to the audience and thinking of as many ways as they possibly can to seduce an audience into liking adverts and wanting to tell their friends about them. The Cravendale campaign is a likeable idea on tv, but the interactivity of the website builds a relationship between the consumer and product that would not have been possible without the web.

• 4. The competition is much tougher: on TV the competitors are other channels. Most channels shyncronise their ad breaks , so, on a micro level your ad doesn’t have much competition aside from other ads. In the case of the internet however, the competition is far greater: every other webpage and surfers of the internet can swiftly navigate away from your page to whatever catches their interest at the click of a mouse.I think that the Cravendale website succeeds in being noticeable, addictive and absorbing enough to hold the internet users attention. It is quite an outstanding novelty to be able to play around with characters that you can also see on TV.

5. Ads are now forced to be more than ads. As quality rises viewers are actually seeking them out, a new medium is born. “The Dove ad ( also known as evolution) is probably the standard bearer. Search for it on Youtube and you’ll see there are 7 or 8 instances with a combined total views of approaching ten million. Even the parodies are in the hundreds-of-thousands viewer range. A quick google blog search shows around 5000 mentions of Dove evolution and the supporting website (‘the campaign for real beauty’) has over 30,000 back links according to yahoo. That’s not bad for a full global brand campaign that cost less than some newspaper ads. A quick glance at Youtube shows that the Cravendale last glass ad has 74,868 hits at the time of writing on one of it’s postings: not quite ten million then, but hey it wasn’t a global campaign! I think it is fair to say that with this campaign Wieden and Kennedy have created something more Than just ads. It would be interesting to have access to the amount of hit the website received. I think they had some great Ideas about how to create an advertising phenomenon in this instance but I want to explore how it could have gone further.

THE CASE OF THE RED BULL TALL STORY CONTEST.

For their latest advertising campaign Red Bull have invented a story writing contest where, based upon the well known ‘Red Bull gives you wings’ animatedcampaign that has been running for the last ten years, the public are invited to write their own story including an instance where Red Bulls energy giving properties cause the story to resolve itself. Subsequently they were able to enter these stories into a competition on the bespoke website where it was possible to illustrate your story and also see the other entrants stories and vote for your favorite. At the end of the competition the winning story will be put forward as the basis of the next Red Bull animated commercial. What this does then is something that the Cravendale campaign never did: it invites the public to take on the role of the advertising creative in a democratic manner. Aside from the actual winner, every Tom, Dick or Harry now has the chance to play the role of advertiser. It is as though the agency Kastner and Partners has really thrown down the gauntlet and said: well if the public think they can have the right to comment on the ads that are being made, let them have a go at our jobs themselves. I think this is bound to be popular as they are giving the consumer what they want and one need only to have glanced at the site to see that they were overwhelmed with entrants.Where the Red Bull campaign stops short is that it doesn’t actually invite the winning entrant to make the animated version of their idea that will air on TV.

HOW COULD THE CRAVENDALE CAMPAIGN BE IMPROVED UPON?In my opinion, W + K have got something to learn from their counterparts handling the Red Bull account. Although the Cravendale website invites it’s audience to have a go at making their own version of the already aired TV spots, and even incitesThem to have a go at stop motion animation at home, it doesn’t invite them to generate the idea for the next Cravedale advert.To my mind the logical conclusion to the interactivity that the internet has bought about in advertising is to have the public not only generate the idea for a subsequent advert for a given product, but also to produce the actual advert to be broadcastthemselves. I am not suggesting that agencies sack all their creative teams and allow the public and amateurs to generate all the ads for their clients: there are plenty of amateurs out there making their own ads for the love and posting them online, but my suggestion only serves to give an opinion of how this particular campaign could go the extra mile. Cravendale could run a competition for people to generate the best idea for the next set of adverts. The winner could then be invited to make the adas director with the guidance of experts at an animation company like Nexus. If the film was a success they could even be invited to be on the directors roster at this company: there’s some incentive!

CONCLUSIONIn conclusion I would like to say that I believe that the interactive nature of the internet and the occurrence of digital advertising for it, has altered the nature of the manner in which the public relate to advertising, as people now feel entitled to a progressively more involved relationship with the media they encounter. It is in my opinion the agencies which are embracing new technology and indeed any imaginable method of interfacing with the consumer, and that are managing to integrate avant-garde and traditional mediums, that are responsible for the more compelling campaigns, and I believe the case of Cravendale to be as worthy an example of such a campaign as any.