Ideas We Love Issue no. 1

Not another Newsletter....?

The two of us (Matt Prentis and Tom Darlington) work with one another at PHD Global Business in London.

We spend a lot of time chatting about what we’re working on, the briefs we’re developing and the work that has caught our eye or captured our imagination.  Typically, we do this over a #6 Pizza and a Coke Zero at Franco Manca in Borough Market.

Aside from a shared belief that all the best conversations are to be had over Pizza (hence our logo), we also believe the media and communications toolkit has never been more substantial or more exciting. The avenues for creativity in communication are vast. 

But, too often, discussion in media and communications is reductive and potentially focussed in the wrong place. On the plumbing and pipes and not necessarily on what the customer sees or experiences.

The best modern thinking in communications planning manages to incorporate and integrate big, creative thinking in channel and execution and use data and technology as the means of delivering it to the consumer.

We both subscribe to Naked Communications’ guiding principle that everything communicates. A thought that encourages planners to think differently about how we define media and even more broadly, advertising. It encourages you to start your thinking in different places. 

The ideas we love typically exploit this belief, too. Adopting a broader, more lateral definition of what they consider to be a media touchpoint, sometimes even creating new ‘media’ opportunities in the process.

For the last 12 months or so, we’ve used a Teams chat to share examples of the work we love with one another, but faced with a new, stringent message retention policy we had to think about a new home for that stuff. 

We could have kept this private. And only time will tell if the decision to do something in public is a good one. 

Ultimately though, publishing our thinking creates a bit of jeopardy. It forces us into a position where we have to add some structure to our thoughts. It also opens our thinking up to constructive criticism from you, the reader. 

We toyed with the idea of starting a podcast to chat about these things.  But it seemed like way too much faff. And no one needs another podcast in their life. 

Hence, we’re starting this newsletter.

A way for us to do our thinking out loud. Of sharing the work we love and hopefully a way of starting a conversation about what brilliant thinking in communications planning looks like today and in the future. 

Ideas we Love

A weekly(ish) love-letter to the work we love, that we’d love to have worked on and a look at the reasons why.

With 3 simple beats each time.

#1 A deep dive into an ‘brand’ idea, old or new, that we particularly love.

Where we intro the idea and why we love it, from a comms planners point of view; extracting a “play” or a “set of plays” that idea has made that you might put into action on something you’re working on.

It might be the likes of a campaign launch from JD…

JD’s Bag for Life ad is a great example of a number of things: a brilliant product insight married to incredible craft in both the hero video asset and then elsewhere on the media plan.

It might be a deeper dive into a brand we love like Palace…

Palace are masters of the modern marketing phenomenon that are ‘branded collaborations’. They also have a habit of producing brilliant marketing materials to go alongside these partnerships. This send up of British TV institution Antiques Roadshow is no exception.

It might just be a great idea, that’s made greater by the way media has been used or created to give that idea the best chance of doing the job it’s been designed to do…

We really love this campaign from New Zealand from Colenso BBDO and our colleagues at PHD. A great example of a reframed brief, but also a brilliant example of creating new and interesting media touchpoints in service of a campaign idea.

#2 What we’d love to have done with it

Where we, free from the shackles of budget or client approval, would have taken the work. We’ll sketch out the the things we’d love to have done with the idea in question given the opportunity. How we would have stretched it into other contexts, or expanded it in new creative canvasses.

And finally…

#3 “If you liked this, you’ll love these….”

If you’re keen to see or be inspired by work of a similar nature, we’ll share some other ideas we love, that this idea made us think of. 

The tasting notes for an idea, if you will.

These will help us categorise what work is bubbling up and why, but also allows us to establish clear links between different brands, different categories and make these links slightly more readily when we’re looking for inspiration as we go about our jobs.

In the case of JD Sports for example, the stuff that immediately springs to mind was:

Adidas Originals, House Party. One of the most memorable, early examples of brands fusing their superstar talent into “real”, more everyday (albeit fictitious) scenarios and the flip in energy that creates; akin to the way JD dripped their A-List talent throughout the film in everyday settings or Nike’s Londoner flexing their talent to put London’s rising talent on a pedestal rather than their own.

The impossible bus shelter, where Pepsi used the orientation of the shelter and what’s around it to magically bring that world to life in AR; akin to JDs used of double sided 6 sheets in bus shelters to hero their “Bag for Life”

And of course that other great example of ‘Bag as distinctive asset’, the below from IKEA and Mother.

Ooooft. That’s Lovely.

‘So what?’ we hear you say….

The reason you might sign up, other than being an interested party is that the stuff we stick down here might give you something to share with your teams or clients when the time comes - and it won’t require anything more than a quick with CTRL + C & CTRL + V. We’re hoping to build a database of these ideas, most likely in a public place like a Google doc (complete with tags and filters), allowing us and you to quickly access and borrow liberally from this growing database of case studies.

Starting in January we’re planning to publish one issue per week, life and workloads permitting.

We’d love for you to join us.

Cheers, 

Matt and Tom