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7 questions for Ogilvy’s Asia boss Paul Heath

7 questions for Ogilvy’s Asia boss Paul Heath

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The world of creativity is one that has gone through a rapid transformation over the past decade.

A shift in the balance of power has seen consumers take charge of what they consume and the terms of how they consume it.

Never has it been more important for brands to oil a great relationship, but cutting through what is today a hugely fragmented market is not easy.

The power of great ideas in this new cycle is critical, says Paul Heath, CEO and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Asia Pacific, who says brands can play a larger role in creating a strong emotional connection to customers.

Heath sat down with Marketing to talk about fame, the role of content and how the agency is applying a much needed (and proven) business case about the power of good ideas.

What has been the big shift in the world of creativity?

The big shift is this balance between give and get and how you get consumers to connect and engage with your brand. The message in this is that creativity has never been more important through all of it. You can be massively creative in this new world and you can also be incredibly well targeted with the right data and the right insights.

How should brands respond to this great fragmentation that has taken place?

I think the business is changing from packaged messages and solutions that you launch and push out and measure two or three months later to see what kind of response you get. Now you know almost immediately whether people are engaging with a message that you send out, which in turn creates opportunities to change it, fix it and respond to it in real time.

For some time we have been championing what we, inside Ogilvy, call the twin peaks of creativity and effectiveness and we believe that if effectiveness is your objective, then creativity is our strategy.

If you use the power of creativity to connect with people you can leverage this new world and consumers will do the job of sharing for you.

http://vimeo.com/95260077

British Airways demonstrates the power of emotional branding.

Ogilvy has developed a theory that creativity increases marketing effectiveness. Has that changed the dynamic for brands?

We have a gentleman called Tim Broadbent (Ogilvy’s global effectiveness director) who for some years now has been pushing this idea that creativity increases marketing effectiveness.

The premise of this is pretty straight forward, but there is now empirical evidence to support it.

In the past it was basically a creative director saying, ‘trust me I’m wearing black, I know what’s right for you’, but now we can find out within minutes of something going live whether it is working or not.

In the old model, clients were deciding what message they wanted to push to their consumers, but that didn’t necessarily mean that that’s what resonated with consumers or even helped cut through the clutter.

There are rules to this. You need to set hard campaign objectives right from the start and this helps to tighten the focus of what you wanted to achieve.

http://vimeo.com/95269500

Data and creativity at work for British Airways.

How has it changed?

With this fragmentation there has been a collapse of the old sales model, everything now happens on one screen almost instantly.

It does call into question a few things you need to ask yourself as a communicator – how am I going to engage? There is still room for brand messages and there is a role very much for paid communications. But on the other side of that equation you’ve got consumers reacting to messages with their own point of view and the thing that overlaps in the middle is engagement. You have to be in the middle fuelling the conversation and making sure they are engaging with what you want to say.

How has content changed this? Especially when you see brands such as Nestlé and Nike moving away from traditional advertising and into providing services. 

Brands that give consumers apps for things like tracking fitness, monitoring health behaviour or dieting, you get something in return because consumers engage with you on those platforms. They put information about themselves and how they behave and as a marketer you get fantastically rich information.

When you think about creativity it’s not just about magnetic content, there are also things that can be very helpful and very personalised.

If you’re an expecting mum there are things that you want that a brand can help you with like access to forums, chats, what to expect in week 12 or access to doctors are incredibly useful. If you’re engaging with consumers like that you can get really interesting insights.

It’s almost like brands are looking to create a deeper relationship with their customers.

The creativity is in making these things relevant and personalised as they can be. There is a symbiotic relationship between giving and getting something back. If you give people content that is entertaining and magnetic, you will get something in return. In the past it was one way – brands would just push a message out and there wasn’t a channel for consumers to directly respond to it.

What is this idea of fame?

We know – and now you can prove it – that part of being creative means it stands out from the crowd. Your work has to cut through and it has to stand out. People don’t pass around dull things. But fame is a lot more than awareness, fame is actually creating things that people talk about and we believe that it’s important to stand for something. Your brand should have a point-of-view. There’s evidence from Millward Brown which shows that’s brands with a point-of-view are much more likely to engage with consumers. 

http://vimeo.com/95268315

Where fun and interactivity merge.

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