WTF is Creative Strategy in Advertising?
- Kevin Ringpis
- Oct 10, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 4, 2022
The creative strategists on your team will help convey your company’s story and make sure the market understands your product and receives your key messages as accurately as possible. Below, we’ll briefly cover what exactly a creative strategy is, and why you should hire a creative strategist.
Introduction
A fine line separates flattery from deception, but neither of these is the aim of creative strategy. It’s a plan of action deeply rooted in advertising. And knowing your brand precedes everything else when doing any form of growth planning.
How do you intend to differentiate yourself from competitors? Conversely, how will you reel customers in?
These two questions are more complex than many business leaders realize, and in this attention economy where we are hopeless members of, how well you advertise your products is crucial to your company’s survival.
Last year, the social media giant Facebook announced their pursuit towards a digital frontier and corporate name: Meta. The tech giant poured millions of dollars into advertising campaigns. But, how well did they advertise the new VR technology that they are selling? Having laid off 11,000 workers, the market’s lack of belief in the company’s identity is clear.
“So, what, you’re a VR-AR tech company now? We’re not buying it,” the market would have said.
But that’s not to say that a Fortune 500 company like Meta that used to be worth over a trillion dollars didn’t have a creative strategy in place. Rather, it’s more likely a question of whether their creative strategists were even heard, let alone had a voice.
The creative strategists on your team will help convey your company’s story and make sure the market understands your product and receives your key messages as accurately as possible. Below, we’ll briefly cover what exactly a creative strategy is, and why you should hire a creative strategist.
What is Creative Strategy?
A creative strategy allows your organization to create a plan for hitting certain goals and objectives, especially those pertaining to brand, marketing, identity, and long-term growth. It’s like having a roadmap, or “a blueprint,” according to management software company Asana.
And at minimum, your overall creative strategy will let you know:
Who your target audience is
What actions you want them to take
Which specific strategies to use, for your audience to take those actions
Why those strategies work
When, or in what situations they don’t tend to work
When trying to release a product or service to the market fast, it can be easy to forget about having any strategy at all. But here’s why you should take steps to establish your company’s creative strategy as early as possible.
Why is Creative Strategy Important?
Creative strategy is important because it ensures that your end product aligns with your expectations. “At its core, strategy is still about finding ways to create and claim differentiation,” says Adam Brandenburger, a professor at the Stern School of Business in NYU.
Brandenbruger wants students and business people to break away from conventional ways of thinking. “If we want to teach students—and executives—how to generate groundbreaking strategies, we must give them tools explicitly designed to foster creativity,” he says.
Creative strategy, when done with intent and purpose, helps companies disentangle themselves from the stereotypes they’ve built around their products and services. And where can we get a sense that companies want to be seen differently? Advertising.
Here are a few creative strategy examples in advertising done in the real world.
3 Real Examples of Creative Strategy in Advertising
Industry: Tourism
What they did: Instead of producing a run-of-the-mill promotional video, they presented what at first looked like a weather report. The broadcaster told the audience what you’d expect, starting with the weather conditions and the snow. Then the video smoothly transitions into a pitch to customers, highlighting their staff, activities, and tours. The post has since gained over 10 million views.
Why it worked: While it helped that their e-commerce manager made a funny cameo, what made this advertisement creative was the element of surprise. They were also explicit in matters their target audience would want to know, such as all the things they could do in the resort.
A red Coca-Cola truck carries cases of Coke products
Industry: Food & Beverages
What they did: They launched The Happiness Truck, where a red truck bearing their brand drove around the streets of Brazil, giving away free Coca-Cola products to whoever pressed a mysterious button. It was a hit, and they replicated the same campaign in Istanbul and Armenia.
Why it worked: For a company like Coca-Cola who has been around a long time, you might think they would run out of ways to meticulously wrap marketing stunts with so-called ‘social causes.’ But with their simple, universally-appealing slogan to ‘spread happiness’, they found a way to reach their audience in a novel way.
Industry: Non-profit
What they did: A picture speaks a thousand words, and the WWF released a striking photo showing what looks like the earth sitting on top of an ice cream cone. The ice cream version of the earth is melting, provoking thoughts of global warming and the degrading effects of man-made intervention.
Why it worked: Creative strategy is just as much applicable to organizations who are not mainly driven by profit or revenue. The WWF used one photo to provoke thoughts in its audience, and it’s a message that can even reach children, who themselves can easily relate to a cone of ice cream.
Hiring a Creative Strategist
From these three simple examples, you can see just how much value a creative strategist can add to your team and your company overall. A creative strategist, according to Indeed, is “a marketing professional who focuses on improving a company’s overall marketing and advertising plans.”
Typically, a creative strategist:
Examines market and industry reports
Identifies important market trends
Performs market research on customer demographics
Hosts focus groups, testing if a strategy works
Meets with clients to discuss their goals for a marketing campaign
Develops marketing strategies that determine the ways of achieving your company’s goals
Adjusts or scraps marketing strategies if their outcomes don’t meet expectations
To sum up succinctly, a creative strategist bridges the ‘left’ and ‘right’ brains of your company, merging intuitive insights with reliable data.
Creative strategists will not spoon-feed you answers concerning your company’s identity. Rather, what they’ll hope to accomplish is a fine-tuned process of making creative decisions that don’t just come out of the blue, but will undergo a rigorous method of planning, insight, research, and experimentation. Having an effective creative strategy will save you time, money, and effort. It will enhance your competitive advantage.
If you're interested in hiring a creative strategist for your brand, you can contact me at kevinringpis@gmail.com.
Comments