Heads Up: Would you like a twig with that?
You sit down to enjoy an ice-cold crushed apple cider. You crack the bottle cap and take your first sip, only to find floating in the top of the bottle is… a small twig. Huh?
Quick open call
Before I dive into this week's edition, I want to announce an open call for guest writers to Heads Up. We’re particularly keen to capture great work from wider than our own global west lens. Have you seen some great ads or tactics that would make for an interesting Heads Up edition? We’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got an idea, get in touch at Letstalk@userfriendly.org.uk
On with the twig-in-bottle issue.
Monteith’s Brewing Company blunder
The Brief: In 2012, New Zealand-based cider brand, Monteith’s Brewing Company ran a large campaign stating “Sorry about the twigs, folks!” after weeks of customers complaining that they were finding twigs in their bottles. But there’s a twist…
The Campaign: The “Sorry about the twigs, folks!” campaign had one major quirk. Monteith’s Brewing Company added the twigs on purpose.
The cider brand prides itself on using freshly crushed apples and pears. The brand used this as its main narrative, fresher than fresh. But instead of just stating something that may or may not be taken as truth, they wanted to find a way to evidence their statement unequivocally.
I read about this in the excellent book, Evolutionary Ideas by Sam Tatam. He uses it as an example for the kind of ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ bias we have with marketing messaging. It’s all too easy to say something, but not really mean it, what is more powerful than a message is evidence.
He states, “Climaxing in a national apology, this simple idea helped to validate their claim “not from concentrate,” strengthening consumer trust and helping Monteith’s grow a whopping 43% that year.”
Why does it stand out?
➡ It has a show-don’t-tell approach which is more powerful than messaging alone
➡ It risked something to make the point, making it all the more distinct and surprising (creating your own PR disaster is a bold move)
➡ ️It perhaps leverages the ‘Pratfall Effect’ (when we like someone (or a brand) more when it falters and owns up to an error)
➡ ️It feels counter-intuitive, but the data shows that it worked
➡ ️The friendly language choice of ‘folks’ provides a warm and honest brand tone
Bringing this into our context, particularly within corporate campaigning, it strikes me that we perhaps lose this evidence component by mostly utilising narrowly targeted digital ads (over mass or public communications). The message we might be sharing with corporate targets is ‘we are powerful and a campaign against you will be public and large’, and yet, digital ads are by nature, narrowly targeted, hidden from most people and carry no evidence factors for power (‘maybe I’m the only person seeing this’). It’s almost a mirage.
Perhaps, instead of silos of targeted digital campaigns, we can ask what we can do that evidences our power? For example, we could ‘mistakenly’ leak a substantial private donation that evidences the power of our resource. ‘Leaked documents reveal *famous-person* has donated £10m to bringing down X brand if it doesn’t commit’… What we want is to produce tangible evidence and make it known.
Heads Up Challenge: Think about how can we provide evidence for our claims.
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
What statements do we rely on people believing? What can we do to create evidence beyond a clever ad or tagline, what physical evidence can we produce?
Your Brief:
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Set aside a weekly 15 minute slot to complete these weekly creative tasks and why not schedule a call with others on your team to talk through your thoughts on this topic and share ideas for you to try out?
Heads Up is a weekly creative digest that encourages animal advocates to take inspiration from case studies of creative campaign tactics outside of our movement.
> ~ 5 minutes read-time (but hopefully gets you thinking for longer than that)
> Demonstrates interesting tactics and use of biases that you can test
> Contains a creative challenge for you to explore independently or with your team with results that you can apply for your important campaigning work
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