Selling the Secrets of Brands

Exclusive Interview

Professor Brian Hallett of IE Business School Madrid works in the field of brand storytelling: he is a visual storyteller. A professional photographer and image maker by trade with more than twenty years experience in 18 countries, his company, The Big Fish has produced online branded content and advertising campaigns for companies like Cartier, Mastercard, Hugo Boss, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Max Factor, ESPN, Patek Phillipe, Hyundai, BMW, Pantene & Wella.

GEORGIA TODAY caught up with him at Rooms Hotel before his talk at the IE Business School Madrid’s master class, ‘Contagious: When Brands Go Viral’.

What are some of the key factors in the advertising campaigns you produce ? Do you have a special formula?

There are lots of different things that you can reach into: you can create online campaigns that are very surprising, that are remarkable, that are shocking. Our campaigns are focused mostly on authenticity. One way to do storytelling is to sit down, write a really cool and clever script and produce it. What we do is create a whole process where the subjects are involved in the creation of the material itself.

To give an example, we did a series of videos recently focused on a series of people’s passions and dreams. We did a long process of workshops with the people, getting them involved in the actual creation of the language that’s used. It’s quite a lengthy process that requires a lot of facilitation and people skills. By going through it, you’re able to get ideas and include content that you would never have got without involving these people in the creative process. The result is that the campaigns are more authentic and authenticity is one of the characteristics of successful online campaigns.

We also tailor the content to the relevant social media platforms that it will be shared on, as each have their own format. With Instagram, for example, we will make short fifteen-second teasers. Also, the interesting thing about Instagram is that a lot of people use it with the sound off, so if you rely on sound to market your brand on this particular platform, it’s not going to work. And so with that in mind, we produce contents with text on the screen, which allows people who use Instagram as a ‘quick fix’ of visual entertainment, to absorb your content. Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be used when we are in a more relaxed state : it’s got a longer format and more information, so for that we might create a two-three minute piece of content.

When we design content, we want to know what our call to action is: what we want people to do upon engaging with this material. Are we trying to drive traffic to the webpage? Then we’ll design another version for a webpage.

I’m not involved in the actual dissemination of the content, but we definitely think about what the platform is in terms of how we produce the content.

Tell us about viral campaigns. What do they have in common, and what elements make them unique?

The problem with the idea of going ‘viral’ is that you can have 100 pieces of content which are exactly the same but only one of those goes viral. Why is that? I compare virality to predicting earthquakes. We know that they are going to happen and approximately where they will be geographically, but we have no idea when/how/where they are going to happen: they are very difficult to predict. The big difference between traditional broadcast advertising and social-sharing (going viral) is that the former has a direct return on investment. For example, if someone bought a page two ad in your newspaper, they would be somewhat guaranteed a certain amount of readership, allowing them to expect a sort of direct return on investment. The problem with social-sharing is that it is very unpredictable: we try to predict it, we try to control it, we try to direct it, but in the end everything is kind of turned around. It’s a much more unpredictable process.

Now what are the factors that make things go viral? Surprise is the main one. In other words, if you see something that is new and different that surprises you, you are much more likely to engage with that content than if it wasn’t surprising. There is something called the MAYA rule (most advanced yet acceptable), and what that means is that something has to be surprising, advanced and a novelty, but acceptable in the sense that if it’s too crazy or too shocking, you might not understand it. Sometimes what brands do is produce crazy content that has nothing to do with the brand itself to get your attention, but then at the end their logo will appear, and all of a sudden you’ll be like “what did that have to with Volkswagen?” for example; why did they show me that content? The MAYA rule is essentially a guideline that tells you to be surprising but not to the extent that you lose people along the way.

Content and context are two other important factors to consider. Your content has to be relevant to the information out there in the world at the given time you put it out there. If you link your content to some contextual or current events, it’s much more likely to catch on.

There’s also celebrity power. Recently, there was a brilliant campaign in Spain where the idea was to create a campaign to get people talking about recycling, and so they got former Real Madrid star Guti to go on Twitter and Facebook commenting how stupid and how much of a waste of time recycling is. Eventually, his comments went so viral that it made the news and was shared amongst the population at large. After a week, Guti gets back on social media and says “Hey everybody, I was just joking. The reason I did that was to raise awareness and to start the conversation about recycling.” So, just by a making a simple statement on social media, you can make a huge ripple effect.

To understand virality, you need to understand its components. First of all, they have a fast increase in sharing (within the first couple of days) before dropping off. The second thing that is really important about viral campaigns is that they are shared amongst many different networks. You are a gatekeeper who has your own network of friends, and one of the characteristics of viral campaigns is that they hop (jump) from network to network. It’s not just a question of say, Béyonce sharing a photo with her x-million of followers, it’s the fact that her followers share it with their own networks that make it viral.

A critical point that brands need to think about when they create content that they want to be shared is not just to target their audience but their audience’s audience. In other words, if I only target you, you will just like my content; however, if I target your audience, you will say ‘Oh, I’m going to share this because the people that follow me will find this interesting’. The key to using social media well is that you have to think about all of these different audiences when designing your campaigning: your audience’s audience’s audience has an audience, too.

So in addition to keeping your audience’s audience in mind, what other components are there to producing a successful campaign? Is there a secret formula?

There are many different ways to break this down but Jonah Berger, Professor at University of Pennsylvania, has got a really interesting book called “Contagious”. He lists a whole series of elements, social currency being one of them. As an example, there is an online store which sells high-end fashion called “vente-privee”. I don’t know if they still do this, but when they first started out they used a strategy where you could only access their store if someone invited you. What it does is give the person who inviting others a certain amount of social currency: it makes them ‘cool’. Those kinds of elements to content creation can help to drive the sharing and how people feel about interacting.

Triggers are another thing. What do you think about first thing on a Monday mornings, what brand or product? A lot people will think of coffee. So if you associated your brand with the trigger of Monday morning coffee, what happens is people start associating with it. Take KitKat and their slogan “take a break, have a KitKat” as an example. In Spain it has become part of the vernacular: when people want to go on a break they say “que voy a tomar un Kitkat” — they’re not actually going to go eat a KitKat but they’re going to go for a break. However, the trigger has become so ingrained in people’s activities that they actually refer to it by the brand.

So there are certain ways we can approach this. Emotional content is also a very important aspect of Brand Storytelling. There is also the public aspect: does this content make me more visible? But the aspect most important for me is the storytelling, the authenticity. You’ll see a lot brands these days producing content that is storytelling: it doesn’t feel like it’s talking directly about the brand, but the brand it’s conveying its values through the stories. This is what I was saying before: you’ll see certain kind of content and go, ‘what does that have to do with The North Face? Indeed, take their example; what does The North Face Sell? Outdoor clothing ? No, they sell Exploration. There are many companies that sell equipment but what North Face sells is a lifestyle. They have so much confidence in their Brand Identity that they can produce a bunch of content without actually featuring any of their products, and just dropping their logo in at the end, and we get it. And in some cases, it’s so powerful, that we SHARE it.

To sell a lifestyle, wouldn’t you already have to be known in the industry?

No, I would think of it in the opposite way. We have this thing called the 'marketing funnel': awareness, all the way down to call to action/purchase. The branded content funnel is a little bit different, you could do brand awareness development through branded content. The effect would be almost the opposite: if I’ve never heard of your brand and you just come to me with your product, I will likely tune it out saying ‘Oh it’s just another add’. But if you come to me, and connect to me somehow in a deeper way, an emotional way, and even more…at a values level, and at the same time make me more aware about what your brand is about, I’ll probably be more interested when you start talking about your product.

So what would your advice be for marketing Georgian wine? Georgia has a special history with wine and was recently found to be the Cradle of Wine with vintages as old as 8000 years found here. And yet, despite this and its quality, hardly anyone knows about it.

If you look at what you’ve just talked about, you’ve mentioned two important things: the first is heritage. Heritage is a really important marketing and storytelling tool. You could do a whole campaign not even talking about the quality of the wine or anything but just focusing on this idea that wine was invented in Georgia. That’s some really interesting! Now the second thing you talked about is that it’s unknown. And if you want to surprise people, wanted to grab people’s attention, it might be interesting to almost play with this idea that it’s a secret. In other words, rather than doing the typical and very obvious “look at the history of Georgian wine”, what if you did the exact opposite? What if you said “look, we have a secret,” and save it, so people don’t know. You could keep talking about it as if it was Italy, France, Spain, and then all of a sudden at the very end you reveal that you were talking about Georgia. Use some aspect which has a surprise element. Capitalize on the fact that it’s a secret.

Every brand has this fascinating secret. I guess the question is to discover the secret and then tell its story.

Mate Foldi