Colenso BBDO/Proximity Auckland’s executive CD Wayne Pick on ‘Creativity with a Purpose’

Wayne Pick, Executive Creative Director at Colenso BBDO/Proximity Auckland explained his approach to ‘creativity with a purpose’ at AD STARS 2016, currently underway in Busan, South Korea.

Pick (pictured) nearly didn’t make it to AD STARS this year. He was marooned by a typhoon at Narita airport for 20 hours, and his eyeball was slashed by a low-flying drone inside Colenso’s offices a week ago.

Finally though, he did make it to AD STARS to present a session called, ‘Creativity with Purpose’. He shared the principles that inspire the work created at Colenso BBDO/Proximity, one of New Zealand’s most celebrated agencies.

1. Ask ‘why?’

Pick began his session by asking why more brands and agencies don’t ask ‘Why?’ more often. It’s not enough for brands to explain what they’re selling – they need to figure out a purpose.

When Colenso was developing a campaign for New World supermarkets, New Zealand ranked 8th in the UN Happiness Index – not good enough.

So the agency gave New World the purpose of making New Zealanders happier, with the goal of attaining the #1 rank on the Happiness Index, beginning with an internal communications campaign to get staff on board.

Next he showed a campaign for Pedigree designed to make the world a better place for dogs by creating K9FM – a radio station for pooches. By creating original content just for dogs, and giving Pedigree a purpose, within two months sales hit a 2-year high.

2. Leverage social connections for good

One example of leveraging connections for good is Colenso’s ‘Found‘ campaign, which used social media to find lost dogs using a real-time lost-dog app, created with Google.

3. Change behaviour

Getting consumers to do things they haven’t done before is another good strategy. For Breast Cancer NZ, Colenso came up with Breast Cream – a way to make checking your breasts a part of women’s regular beauty routine. Launched in October 2014 and distributed through New Zealand’s four biggest supermarket chains, sales of the product were strong. It shows a simple change in behaviour can change lives.

4. Evoke pride

Another tactic that works is giving people a sense of strength, vitality and pride.

He showcased the ‘Feel tip top‘ campaign, which encouraged people to send messages to others to make them feel tip top, for Tip Top ice cream, which turned a 10-year category decline into instant growth.

5. Impact society

To show how brands can affect society more broadly, he shared the secrets behind Brewtroleum. First, Colenso came up with the platform, ‘Made by doing’.

“To make it tangible, we then had to do something. We discovered beer waste can be used to make biofuel. The more beer you drink, the more biofuel you can make. The more you drink, the more we can save the world.”

DB Export became New Zealand’s fastest selling beer brand.

“We’re phenomenally proud of that campaign and love that it’s changed the way DB positions itself. They’ve now put sustainability as one of their core values and may look to producing biofuel as a permanent solution.”

Pick also showed Colenso’s campaign for Anchor milk. Apparently 59 kids in NZ break an arm every day, so Colenso gave little kids with broken arms a plaster cast with a bar code, which could be swiped to get free milk until their bone’s healed.

He finished the session by sharing a philosophy at Colenso: ‘love and trust’. “If we earn the love and trust of our clients we can do the work we need to do. If we spend 90% of time doing work that’s responsible and does its job, we can spend 10% of our time doing risk-taking work like Brewtroleum. But you need to be able to do the 90% well first.”

His final words of wisdom: “Make sure you create with purpose. Dive into the history of the brand and do something that’s unique to that brand. Be interesting. If you wouldn’t share it, no one else is going to. Tell a story only your brand can. Be useful. I’m not loyal anymore to brands, but they can bribe me with real usefulness or utility.”