Creativity in media is less about pushing one big message out to lots of people than it is generating conversations with consumers at every step of their purchase journey, says David Gaines, Chief Strategy Officer, Wavemaker US.
“We’re moving away, I would argue, from media planning and saying ‘well, we actually need a content strategy,’” Gaines says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Media creativity involves how to represent the story of a brand in a way that’s appropriate, including during the priming stage, “when I am trying to create a position for my brand of favor, so that when somebody gets to the trigger point…there is a better predisposition for my brand relative to the things I need to say once they’re in that purchase journey cycle.”
The plethora of options for media consumption have pushed creativity in a way “that we’ve not really been able to think of it definitely a decade or so ago,” Gaines adds.
The concept of having “one big idea” and exposing it to lots of people is no longer operable, according to Gaines. “That only really works if you have brand new news,” he says. “Or you’ve got a new launch. Ninety-nine percent of the products we work with are trying to create greater share, growth in some shape or form. Revenue, share of market, consumption.”
Thus media creativity now involves generating a conversation that keeps people engaged all the way around their purchase journey. “So that what I do from a broadcast perspective and awareness perspective has an amplified effect on converting people to buy my product or buy my service,” says Gaines.
This video is part of a leadership series presented by Wavemaker, the GroupM media agency formed by the merger of MEC and Maxus. Please find additional segments from the series here.
