 Hi there, my name is Brandon Swansborough. I graduated from the University of Newcastle in 2008 with a Bachelor of Business and a Bachelor of Economics. The following year, I scored my first gig working in advertising with an agency called Sachi and Sachi in Sydney. Since then, I've spent 13 years working at a few different agencies across Sydney and New York and working across a range of national and international clients and just being very lucky to work with a bunch of really smart, cool humans. About four years ago, I moved back to Newcastle to work at Enigma. Enigma is one of the biggest regional agencies in Australia. We have offices in Sydney and Newcastle and a really great list of regional and national clients. So, yeah, getting to live in Newcastle and work at Enigma means that I get the lifestyle and get to continue to further my career. So, basically, get to have my cake and eat it too. So, what I wanted to talk to you about today is in the 13 years since I've been in the industry, a hell of a lot has changed. But there's one thing that hasn't changed and that is the importance of insight. So, insight for strategic and creative agencies, the ability to harness unique insights through your communications is important now more than ever. Communications that effectively leverage insights are more generally more effective communications. So, what we're going to talk about today is what is an insight? How do you craft a good insight? How do you know when you've got one? And how do you use insight to inform strategic propositions and, in turn, better creative ideas? Insights in an advertising stance or another way to define it is a new, usable, unexpected or intriguing perspective on the relationship between a brand slash category and its intended customers. So, this is a quick diagram to show how, ideally, insights and strategy combine to inform a proposition and will then inform hopefully a great creative idea. And when it works well, when it does happen, is when you've got a really unique insight coupled with a smart strategy that informs a good proposition that may allow you to come up with a famous idea. And for those of you who are less marketing heads and, you know, more commercially minded and particularly for anyone who's ever referred to the marketing department as a coloring in department, famous work creates growth more effectively. So, there is a direct correlation with creating famous brand work and increased sales revenue. And I didn't just make this up. There's been a bunch of research now done that shows this. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's about making good work and good insights enable this. A lot of ads, you know, don't have an idea of them. And that's fine. You know, their purpose is to convey information to people who are looking for that information and to drive short term sales. But what they don't do is help achieve your long term brand targets. So, brand building and sales activations work over different time frames. So, you know, if you look at the yellow lines here, the yellow line here, you can see that, you know, short term sales are driven by sales of activation. But if you want to have long term sales growth, you need to have brand building activity. And there needs to be a combination of the two in order to ensure success. You know, that graph and a bunch of creative effectiveness work has been done by these guys over the past 10 years, really leading the way in terms of creative effectiveness. And if you're not across the long and short of it from 2013, or more recently, the effectiveness code, which kind of they've looked at a bunch of data and effectiveness studies from all around the world to come up with these findings and provide tips on how to utilize creative effectiveness. Definitely mandatory reading for the marketers out there. I'm going to talk a little bit about how we create great insights and just some tactics that you can use to employ to be able to do that. Firstly, no new insights come from Google. You can search or you want, but you need to get out there and get in the real world and see how your product or brand is used and how people actually interact with brand in order to unearth real insights. Ask good questions. And don't be satisfied with the first answer. You need to dig into the who, what, where, when of the brand, the product. Really try and get under the skin of what it is you're looking to achieve and the audience that you're speaking to to inform your insights. Also, who is a consumer? What do we really know about them is crucial because there's so much data out there these days, but you need to make sure that the data that's informing your insights is accurate and it's not a bit of a red herring or that there's not a bit of data or that you've overlooked in the informing your insights. And finally, in what ways does the consumer interact with the brand? We'll talk about this one a little bit later on with some of the examples, some of the example work that I'll share and talk about how getting to understand how the consumer interacts with the brand can inform unique insights and human truths that nobody's tap into it before. Before we kind of come back to insights, I wanted to talk a little bit about what is a single-minded proposition? The prop sums up the most important thing you can say about the brand and the product. It lives in a creative brief and a lot of creators will say that it's the most important line in a brief and a lot of the time, the only the main line that their eyes will go straight to in the brief. The longer a single-minded proposition, the weaker the ideas that will result from the brief. The more we say in marketing, the less that people will listen and that is a real truth. If I throw one tennis ball at you, you might catch it. If I throw five, you probably won't catch any and therefore it was pointless. Proposition must be unique. It has to offer something that the competition can't or doesn't offer and has to be strong enough to move the mass millions or more simply put, what's in it for me? Me being the consumer, that needs to come through in your proposition otherwise it's not going to come through in the ideas that you get back. This classic hungry thirsty campaign from Oak is, I love this and I know that for a fact that this line actually came off from the proposition and ended up becoming the creative idea because it was such a unique truth that none of the competition had used before and I think they're actually starting to use this again. So tips on getting started with your proposition, don't try and wordsmith it, make it perfect from the start. It's easier just to start the right stuff and then take it out. Think about your audience, think about what's important to them and then think about how it's going to resolve the insight you've found. Ask for opinions, ask colleagues thoughts, ask your partner, you just got to talk about it if you want to get there and then once you've got it evaluating it, have you heard it before? Is it single-minded? Is it insightful or inspiring and can it be more succinct? Can you get it down to one or two or three words? Now I'm just going to talk a little bit about what is an idea? What actually is an idea? So information that is wrapped in an idea will engage, entertain and intrigue you. Engage, entertain and intrigue you. And every now and then, you know, it might shock you and I know this is an ad that when I saw it the first time, it definitely hit home with me and I don't think I need to explain to you what the insight is in that one. The definition of a creative idea is a creative transformation of the strategic benefit that is mind and or heart opening, meaningful to the consumer and surprisingly distinctive. Or put more simply, something that brings your insight and strategy to life in an interesting and compelling way. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to talk about five different types of insights and five campaign examples and campaigns that I've worked on that, you know, bring those insights to life. So the first is a campaign that I worked on for Two Is New about 12 years ago. You know, some people might remember it as the Two Is New beer economy. Basically, you do, you made a favor and he pays you in beers. No beer brand had ever done this before and it informs a fully integrated campaign that we rolled out over the next year to the point that we had stickers that shops, we put on their shop front saying that they would exchange goods and services for beer. You know, we created a suite of print assets that use the beer graph to show how big of a, how big of a favor, how different favors are going to cost you more beer like this one, which was classic and we rolled out one day after the Melbourne Storm salary cap. This campaign allowed Two Is New to beat VB in sales for the first time in 40 years. And the way that it did that is because it was backed by a category insight, which is that in Australia beer is currency. That's a true real category insight that no one had tapped into before and it resonated with people. The next campaign I'm going to talk about is a Super Bowl spot that I worked on when in New York for Budweiser. This went on to be the number one Super Bowl spot of that year. I think it had 35 million views on YouTube before it even aired. And it was just such a simple, beautiful story about this rancher who raises a Clyde Stalefoul, follows the story through from when he has to say goodbye and then to this amazing emotional story at the end. And the execution was phenomenal and had Stevie and Nick's landslides attract and made America cry. But behind it was a human insight in that real friendship is ever enduring and it's beautiful when the execution brought the beauty of that to life. But I think just sticking to that simple emotive story and bringing that insight to life is what made this so effective. The next campaign is Samsung Pocket Patrol. And so this one is where we worked with Surf Life-Saving Australia to develop an augmented reality app where people could use their phones, pull it out at the beach and see where the hazards are on the beach in real time. We ended up rolling it out over a three-week trial up in the Sunshine Coast working with Surf Life-Saving Australia and it went gangbusters in that, you know, it was got picked up both nationally and internationally through, I think it was like 300 different press articles and everybody was talking about it because it was backed by this societal insight that people think they know where the rips are, but they don't. And there's a bit of a product inside in there as well in that, you know, about we knew for a fact that 95% of Australians take their phone to the beach. So we knew that it was likely going to work and that people might actually use it. But yeah, really, really effective campaign and a real true societal insight at the heart of it. The next one is a campaign that we did for McDonald's Jones here at Enigma where, you know, we went out and found a family, a dad who works away from home a lot. We wanted to do this thing where we would actually take the home to him. And the consumer insight behind this is that McDonald's Jones homes build homes that allow you to be your best self. We found this out through chatting through a bunch of consumers and knew it to be true. And off the back of that builder campaign that we knew that the competition couldn't do, which is, you know, actually building this replica of his son's room and then taking it to his location while he was working away from home and giving him the surprise of his life. And again, a really emotional story, well told, but at the heart of it was that consumer, was that consumer truth that, you know, we spoke to McDonald's Jones customers and they said that when they were at home, they felt like they were the best selves. So we did the hard work up front to establish that and then we built a creative idea off the back of it. The next is this campaign that we did called 360 Reasons where we basically, you know, went and shot a bunch of locations around New Castle and then went to Sydney and had an unbranded activation, asked people to, you know, guess where in the world they are. And, you know, crazily, a lot of people were guessing all these different places all around the world, which I kind of, we hoped it happened. But, you know, the product, this was based on a unique product insight, which is that New Castle has a bunch of places that are surprisingly global. And if you didn't know any better, you wouldn't believe that they're a New Castle. You could think that there are other places well. And, you know, this is a hugely effective campaign and got and had 100,000 shares organically within a week, because I think people in New Castle and people have left that resonated with them and they wanted to share and talk about it. Those are five different types of insights and hopefully this has been a helpful little glimpse into how you're able to use unique insights and the smart strategy to inform good propositions and hopefully when done right, hopefully it leads to the famous work and famous ideas. That's it from me. Thank you for your time. Have a good one.