#colensobbdo

Last August, Colenso BBDO won Grand Prix of the Year at AD STARS 2017 for the ingenious PEDIGREE® Child Replacement Programme, which encourages empty nesters to adopt their own pooch. It’s a title that comes with a US$10,000 cash prize, so we were curious to catch up with Colenso to find out what they’ve been up to since then - and how they spent the prize money! 

Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Colenso BBDO is one of the world’s most renowned creative agencies, and it will celebrate its 50-year anniversary next year.

Dan Wright, Executive Creative Director, and Ahmad Salim, Group Business Director, kindly took time to reflect on winning the top gong at AD STARS 2017.

What were the risks or challenges of bringing the PEDIGREE Child Replacement Programme to life?

Dan: “The brief for PEDIGREE Adoption drive is consistent: connect dogs that need homes with homes that need dogs. The challenge is uncovering new angles on the relationship between humans and dogs. For PEDIGREE, the answer is always hidden in that relationship, and like any other, it includes love and loss and longing.

“The first stroke of genius the team had was discovering a new emptiness to fill in the large homes of middle-aged parents. But the second was equally crucial to the result – treating the situation with the perfect amount of disrespect. The insight behind Child Replacement Programme was what made it right, but its bluntness was what made it famous.”

Is there a secret to creating campaigns in which every element is equally strong?

Dan: “I wish there was a magic reveal, but the reality is the team worked their arses off. On the insight, on the program, on the website, and then on crafting print and film and custom products – all of which stood on their own. There was a time when an agency would come up with a program idea like Child Replacement and it would be job done. We’ve seen it many times – when an agency has an idea for a product or a program that itself needs advertising, it gets some of the straightest ads ever. We forget to be creative when we’re promoting our own ideas. This is the most exciting thing about Child Replacement Programme – it reminds us we can (and must) do both.”

It’s been one year since you (Dan) & Levi Slavin returned to Colenso from BBDO New York. Why did you decide to come back?

Dan: “We came back because we realised that Colenso was in a position to act on the theories that were being discussed at length within North American agencies. I’d learned an enormous amount from some blisteringly smart people there, but I think there’s an impatience that’s bred in the southern hemisphere that wants to put it all into action. It’s been clear for a long time that agencies can be much nimbler in New Zealand, but it’s never clearer than when you work somewhere else. We felt like now, more than ever, we wanted to be somewhere we could move quickly. And we’re definitely doing that.”

Colenso has been at 100 College Hill for a while now. Is there something in the water there that contributes to the agency’s successes?

Dan: “At the moment, we have some pretty cool taps that dispense sparkling as well as chilled and standard water, but they are a pretty recent thing. Colenso has been at 100 College Hill for over 20 years, and over that time the agency has been in continuous flux. We’ve seen new businesses grow from within the agency, we’ve had close group partners share the address, we’ve had collaborators and friends of the agency move in and out. 100 College Hill covers all of that. I think everyone who arrives here takes the role of continuing the agency’s success personally. Having such a long-standing home for that is great, but it’s the people who carry it off.”

Colenso won US$10,000 at AD STARS 2017. What did you do with the prize money?

Ahmad: “It’s always nice to win a cash prize with an award, and we don’t have a set rule around how to spend them when we do. This one came in just as we were looking at some R&D costs for a tech-first for PEDIGREE, which we hope to roll out in the near future, and everyone involved decided that was the right way to invest it.”

As Group Business Director, can you tell us about your role in bringing the campaign to life, the agency’s approach to creative/account teams, and your relationship with the client?

Ahmad: “I’m lucky to be surrounded by an amazing team who are well practiced at delivering amazing work. That said, I do still love being on the tools and find it hard to stay away from making work this rewarding. My real job is generally to work alongside our creative leadership and make sure that as we go through and build the many parts of a platform this complex, we stay tight to the original idea and never lose sight of the business objective for the client.

“It’s a real strength I’ve found in the agency during my time here – that unlike many others, there’s no default tension between account management and creative because we’re all here for the same thing – delivering incredible work that works.  

“We have a way of working at Colenso that we call The Game of Love and Trust. It’s presented as a set of beautifully designed playing cards, and consists of 14 mantras and musings that embody our values. The crux of it is wonderfully illustrated by our relationship with the team at Mars both locally and globally. “They have absolute faith in our motivation to help them meet their business objectives and fulfil their purpose as both brands and people. In return, we are rewarded with trust and freedom to make and craft work that we’re truly proud of.”

How do you follow on from a campaign as successful as this one?

Ahmad: “Haha! That would be telling, but when it comes to PEDIGREE, we’re always looking for new ideas and playing with new technologies that can help us fulfil the brand’s purpose of making the world a better place for dogs.”

PEDIGREE SelfieStix has also been a huge success this year. Was there a point where you thought developing facial recognition technology for dogs might be too hard? Is the idea really going global now?  

Ahmad: “Getting SelfieSTIX into the world was genuinely challenging. We had reached out to all of our friends at Google, Facebook and Snapchat to see if anyone had a way to make it work, but the tech just didn’t exist to create a platform that did what we needed it to do. There was a point when we were pretty stumped, until one of our creative tech team came to us and said he’d found the Stanford University data set and with some hard work and a good machine learning platform, we could teach a system to do it. It took a long time but was totally worth it.”

“SelfieSTIX is already confirmed to run in 24 markets around the world, which we’re really excited about.”

Wayne Pick nearly didn’t make it to AD STARS this year. He was marooned by a typhoon at Narita airport for 20 hours, and his eyeball was slashed by a low-flying drone inside Colenso’s offices a week ago.

Finally though, he did make it to AD STARS to present a session called, ‘Creativity with Purpose’. He shared the principles that inspire the work created at Colenso BBDO/Proximity, one of New Zealand’s most celebrated agencies, where Pick is ECD.

#1 Ask ‘why?’

Pick began his session by asking why more brands and agencies don’t ask ‘Why?’ more often. It’s not enough for brands to explain what they’re selling – they need to figure out a purpose.

When Colenso was developing a campaign for New World supermarkets, New Zealand ranked 8th in the UN Happiness Index – not good enough.

So the agency gave New World the purpose of making New Zealanders happier, with the goal of attaining the #1 rank on the Happiness Index, beginning with an internal communications campaign to get staff on board.  

Next he showed a campaign for Pedigree designed to make the world a better place for dogs by creating K9FM – a radio station for pooches. By creating original content just for dogs, and giving Pedigree a purpose, within two months sales hit a 2-year high.

#2 Leverage social connections for good

One example of leveraging connections for good is Colenso’s ‘Found’ campaign, which used social media to find lost dogs using a real-time lost-dog app, created with Google.  

#3 Change behaviour

Getting consumers to do things they haven’t done before is another good strategy. For Breast Cancer NZ, Colenso came up with Breast Cream – a way to make checking your breasts a part of women’s regular beauty routine. Launched in October 2014 and distributed through New Zealand’s four biggest supermarket chains, sales of the product were strong. It shows a simple change in behaviour can change lives.

#4 Evoke pride

Another tactic that works is giving people a sense of strength, vitality and pride.

He showcased the ‘Feel tip top’ campaign, which encouraged people to send messages to others to make them feel tip top, for Tip Top ice cream, which turned a 10-year category decline into instant growth.

#5 Impact society

To show how brands can affect society more broadly, he shared the secrets behind Brewtroleum. First, Colenso came up with the platform, ‘Made by doing’.

“To make it tangible, we then had to do something. We discovered beer waste can be used to make biofuel. The more beer you drink, the more biofuel you can make. The more you drink, the more we can save the world.”

DB Export became New Zealand’s fastest selling beer brand.

“We’re phenomenally proud of that campaign and love that it’s changed the way DB positions itself. They’ve now put sustainability as one of their core values and may look to producing biofuel as a permanent solution.”

Pick also showed Colenso’s campaign for Anchor milk. Apparently 59 kids in NZ break an arm every day, so Colenso gave little kids with broken arms a plaster cast with a bar code, which could be swiped to get free milk until their bone’s healed.

He finished the session by sharing a philosophy at Colenso: ‘love and trust’. “If we earn the love and trust of our clients we can do the work we need to do. If we spend 90% of time doing work that’s responsible and does its job, we can spend 10% of our time doing risk-taking work like Brewtroleum. But you need to be able to do the 90% well first.”

His final words of wisdom: “Make sure you create with purpose. Dive into the history of the brand and do something that’s unique to that brand. Be interesting. If you wouldn't share it, no one else is going to. Tell a story only your brand can. Be useful. I’m not loyal anymore to brands, but they can bribe me with real usefulness or utility.”

Work 'til you die Don't you just love it when companies have good advertising campaigns?  I thought I would share my appreciation for the BNZ KiwiSaver campaign, very catchy and to the point!  

Not only is it catchy but it appeals to a wide range of people, through customised lyrics that relate to different professions.

Stop Press compared their campaign to the video "Dumb ways to die".  

I think this could have been part of the inspiration behind the campaign.  The cheerful tone, contrasts with the lyrics communicating the sad (but true) fact, that many New Zealanders are happy to pass on KiwiSaver contributions in order to get more money in their pocket at the end of the week.

Its good to know that I wont be working 'til I die, because my contributions havent stopped since KiwiSaver was first introduced back in July of 2007.  YAY!

Dupstep + Kinect = Awesome visual instrument

New World - 'Lucky Day' TV commercial by Colenso BBDO

Fantastic day in the life series of ads for New World New Zealand grocery stores. 

See the other two ads in the series at adweek.com

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