Creative lessons from Most Contagious
By Jenna Gifford, Senior Consulting Director, Creative Strategist
A new year is upon us, and the last is already a distant memory. But one 2024 highlight that has stayed with me through the haze of cheese boards and Netflix marathons is Most Contagious, the annual showcase of some of the year’s best creative work, which I attended at London’s Southbank at the end of the year.
The concept that good creative helps stories travel is not exactly groundbreaking. And yet… when it comes to the world of social impact, community impact, ESG, sustainability (insert preferred terminology), often we are so focused on delivery and risk management that we forget the role that creativity can play to make our ideas better and more effective, to engage a wider audience, to demonstrate leadership.
So, to reboot my brain this January, and hopefully spread a little creative inspiration for the year ahead, I’m sharing five lessons from Most Contagious, illustrated through five of my favourite campaigns. Enjoy!
1. Treat every business challenge as a potential creative opportunity
For more than 14 years, IKEA’s advertising was centred around the creation of big, sexy TV adverts. So when TV ads were centralised under the global team last year, the UK remit was suddenly reduced to a series of ‘bitty’ briefs – think staff recruitment drives and new store openings. Not, on the face of it, the stuff of creative dreams.
After initial disappointment, the team saw this setback for the opportunity that it was – a chance to rethink their previous obsession with TV and challenge themselves to apply that same ‘big brief’ creativity to the everyday briefs, turning IKEA’s ‘the wonderful everyday’ from a tagline into an ethos.
Case in point - a brief to support store recruitment and highlight IKEA’s ‘non-linear development path’ became ‘The Co-Worker’, an entire IKEA store recreated within Roblox. Players were invited to apply to become a paid worker in the virtual store, completing various roles to progress. The idea took off, receiving 178,000 applications for the virtual roles and resulting in a 50% uplift in real store recruitment a month after launch.
2. Don’t chase short-term gains at the expense of long-term brand equity
Heetch is a Parisian ride sharing app and competitor to Uber. As they admit themselves, there’s little to differentiate them from their US counterpart aside from their French-ness and the fact that they serve the outer suburbs where many Parisians live (unlike Uber). So for years they leant into these differences, defining themselves as a French brand, for French people, with a bold creative approach befitting of a challenger brand.
Then came the 2024 Paris Olympics, and with it, fears of travel chaos and public infrastructure meltdown as 15 million foreign tourists descended on the city of light. Heetch had an important decision to make – should it capitalise on the biggest commercial opportunity it had ever had, or continue to focus its efforts on a population of locals who were leaving the city in droves?
Heetch chose to double down on their strategy. They decided to use their entire marketing budget to advertise their biggest competitor – Uber – to tourists. The thought process being that if all the tourists get Uber, all the Heetch cars will be kept free for Parisians, who would in turn reward the brands ‘declaration of love’ with long term loyalty.
The social and OOH campaign advertised Uber to tourists in 12 foreign languages, with OOH placements across all Games locations as well as the major tourism attractions in the city. Each ad included a sign off in French for locals, calling on them to recommend Uber to tourists so the Heetch cars would be kept free for them.
Their bravery paid off – only 3% of Heetch passengers over the Olympic period were foreigners, whilst French clients increased 37% YOY, making it the best summer ever for Heetch.
What seems at first counter-intuitive is actually an incredibly simple and logical idea – investing in your long-term customers over a huge but transient audience who will come and go in a fortnight. And yet it is undoubtably a surprising approach that few others would be brave enough to take.
3. Don’t be scared to inject some personality
Loewe, the Spanish fashion brand, had a business problem – no one knew how to say its name. Or spell it for that matter. Which means people can’t ask for it, tell their friends about it, or search online for it.
To address this problem, they worked with Dan Levy (of Schitt’s Creek fame) to create Decades of Confusion, a comedy skit starring Levy as the judge of a spelling bee competition, with Aubrey Plaza as the hapless contestant trying (and failing) to spell Loewe. Written and directed by Levy, the film featured archive Loewe throughout and served as a vehicle to deliver messages about the brand to viewers in a way that felt fun and non-contrived.
Recruiting Dan Levy and Aubrey Plaza to write and star in your campaign might be beyond the budgets of most, but that’s missing the point. Every fashion brand features heavyweight A-listers in their campaigns, but very few utilise their talents. And I can’t think of the last fashion campaign I saw that was FUNNY. By getting Dan Levy to write and direct the film, Loewe created something that was relatable and aspirational, that people would actually want to watch.
And it worked – helping Loewe go from being one of LVMH’s least-known brands to become the hottest fashion brand in the world according to the Q2 2024 Lyst Index.
(And for future reference, it’s pronounced Lo-weh-vay).
4. Do stay curious and evolve
Channel 4’s Superhumans campaign played a pivotal role in catapulting the Paralympics into the mainstream, tripling viewers for the Games in 2012. The hugely successful campaign depicted Paralympians as strong, tough, driven athletes, countering the perception of them as inferior to Olympians, and the concept was evolved for the 2016 and 2020 Games.
But as time went on, a growing number of people in the disabled community voiced concerns that the Superhumans label created unrealistic expectations and harmed inclusion efforts by othering disabled people. And so it was that the Channel 4 team made the daunting decision to retire one of its most successful campaigns and create something new for 2024.
Channel 4’s own audience research was the starting point for the new campaign. It found that “seeing athletes overcome adversity” was the top reason people chose for watching the Paralympics, with a love of sport coming a distant 8th in the list of reasons for watching. This well-meaning but patronising sentiment frames disability as something to ‘overcome’, reinforcing the idea that there is something in the disabled person that needs to change. It is at odds with the progressive view of disability as a social condition, whereby it is the structural barriers that society puts in the way that determines what disabled people can or can’t do, and which need to be changed.
Working with the disabled community (via Purple Goat), Channel 4 set out to create a campaign that would shift the focus of the Paralympics, from a chance for viewers to witness athletes overcoming disability, to become a moment for viewers to overcome their well-intentioned but patronising views about disability.
The new creative, “Considering What?” saw Paralympians battle to overcome the same forces that all athletes battle against – gravity, friction, time – and invited viewers to see them as the elite athletes that they are, not a back story to be overcome.
5. Good ideas can come from any level
And finally, two interns became the talk of Cannes last year when they won a Gold Lion in Audio for a radio ad they created for a laxative brand. Miami Ad School students Nidhi Shah and Rag Brahmbhatt describe the ad as an ‘elaborate poop joke’ and note that their win was made even more remarkable by the fact that they don’t listen to radio.
You can have a listen to the ad here, but more useful perhaps is the advice from Shah and Brahmbatt on encouraging creative excellence from junior talent – don’t expect gold ideas from the start, let us go wild, ask for our opinions, show us the playbook, bet on a fresh perspective and (most importantly), buy us a good coffee.