By Colleen Brett, Executive Creative Director, Inizio Evoke Comms
Creative overload! On January 30, Stephanie DeViteri, President, Inizio Evoke Comms North America, and I, teamed up to attend the Most Contagious Event in New York City for a barrage of inspiration from the biggest campaigns of the year. The event brings forward a year’s worth of marketing trends and advertising insights to help inspire better, braver work.
At Inizio Evoke Comms, we’re always looking for ways to innovate with our clients and bring different thinking to the table. Here are my top 4 insights from the event:
Engage culture by driving it or riding it (thanks Dr. Marcus Collins for our new catchphrase: drive culture or suck tailpipe!). Elf’s So Many Dicks campaign showcased how to externalize and mobilize company values as a way to democratize board rooms and involve underrepresented people in the same way that they market their makeup brand.
AI is not the answer – it’s the inspiration. AI can certainly help us move faster to enhance our creativity, but it’s no replacement for a unique idea. We were wowed to see how #BestPhonesForever and #Hatch sound machines amped up their ad iterations with inhuman speed…but leveraged human input directly from their customers.
Find the data to back up big ideas. We loved hearing the conception story behind Grubhub’s Special Delivery campaign – it almost never made it past the initial pitch, but the team dug for insights that fed into the logistics that made it all make sense.
Don’t let logic hold you back. No social? No money? No problem. NutterButter resuscitated their social presence with what can only be described as an unhinged fever dream that was so nutty, that it did all the work on its own. Logic be damned, this campaign lives in a parallel universe and WE LIKE IT.
I have to give a shout-out to the Contagious MCs who showed us a master class in how to present with energy and smarts (including the funny, beautiful slides). We can’t wait for next year!