Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Sage advice from a true heavyweight. The legendary Muhammed Ali knew that it's not just brute force that wins through; it's quick thinking, skill, tactics and creativity. That's where real strength lies, whether you're in the red corner or creating a killer marketing campaign.
Yes, it's great to have a vast budget to play with. But while there's no denying the sheer creative force and reach of famous well-financed campaigns like Adam & Eve's Long Wait for John Lewis, or Joan Collins' memorable turn for Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO's You're Not You When You're Hungry, a small budget should never mean thinking small. Quite the opposite, according to Garry Munns, integrated creative director at Arc UK. Their Untouchable Covers campaign for Lürzer's Archive magazine picked up Best Small Budget Campaign at the 2013 Best Awards.
"It's all about having a really good core insight that you can dramatise and build on," says Munns. "And you don't have to do that in an expensive way."
The team built their campaign around one killer insight: that Lürzer's Archive is "the world's most stolen magazine". Munns elaborates: "You can't leave it on your keyboard anywhere where there's creatives. Otherwise, it's gone. The client mentioned that on their website, and we picked it up and went from there."
The brief was to increase subscriber rates. The solution: six subscriber-only lovingly crafted covers for fake magazines that no creative would be seen dead with, including Account Man Monthly ("100 ways to spot creativity – plus how to kill it"), De-Worming World ("Too Cool For Stool?") and Cockhandler (revealing 2012's "best British cocks"). Slip one of these over your copy of Lürzer's, the thinking ran, and you'll never have to keep watch over it again.
A few mentions in industry publications and the campaign took off, generating €58,000 (£49,000) in additional subscriptions in less than a month. "We've created almost an addition to the product, which became so sought-after that all we had to do was make sure a few people knew about it and suddenly everyone wanted one," says Munns.
That talkability and buzz doesn't have to be limited to the more fun campaigns, either. Youth marketing agency Livity faced a very different challenge when charged, by the NSPCC's ChildLine, to reach older teenagers from black and minority ethnic backgrounds to increase the likelihood of them contacting the service.
"Not just the budget but also the timings were incredibly tight," says Livity chairman Sam Coniff. "How do you match those with a brief that is asking you to get your teenage audience to not think of ChildLine as ChildLine, which has a largely middle-class, white image?"
The answer was the Final Verse campaign, which won the Best 2012 Best Consumer Campaign award. Urban music star Devlin wrote and performed an original track, "Teardrops", that was missing a final verse, challenging the teen audience to write their own. More than 1,000 video entries were uploaded, there were a million video views, and ChildLine recorded a 60% increase in audience feeling that the service "is for them".
"What made Final Verse successful wasn't necessarily Livity or ChildLine – it's the fact that thousands of young people became its voice," says Coniff. "Devlin came aboard, he set the tone, and a thousand kids then spoke from their hearts about issues that mattered to them. That was more valuable than any Google space you can buy.
"Seeing these girls and boys in their bedrooms singing their hearts out was amazing, as was the creativity with which they recorded, edited and cut together their verses. They talked about issues from alcohol abuse in their families to school bullying. It was incredibly touching and very humbling. The notion of creativity being the preserve of the "creative" is just outdated. Creativity exists in everyone – and we need to think about it more holistically in terms of how we communicate with people."
Awards like the Bests, says Kate Brundle, Livity's business development and marketing director, are the perfect place to showcase these high-impact, low-budget campaigns across the industry. "Winning the Best Awards has been a pivotal moment for us as a small, innovative agency," she says. "Awards aren't everything, but it definitely means people take your creative and results a little more seriously – it's a kind of external validation."
So if you want your campaign to hit home, don't bemoan your lack of budget – embrace it. "You can spend lots of money but it's no good if you don't have a strong idea," says Munns. "There's so much creativity around in this day and age that we need to work even harder. So find that great insight, the nugget that's the catalyst for creating an idea. Get to the idea, then keep it as simple and as original as you can. Ideas are at the core of everything; that's how you engage with people. That's something you don't need a big budget for."
