I’M pleased 12 blokes in a hotel room on the French Riviera found the “Jim Beam 1900” campaign worthy of the Grand Prix Direct.
Even more pleasing was the fact that almost 40,000 blokes responded to the ads and rang the helpline. And that millions of cans of Jim Beam were sold. And that share grew 4.3%. And that the client’s bottom line got a substantial boost.
It’s proof that creativity and effectiveness are not mutually exclusive. And that direct advertising doesn’t have to be dull.
Importantly, there was no above or below-the-line in this campaign. That’s old direct. Indeed there was no line. One team did all the work, right down to writing and recording the helpline answering machine messages and penning the response letters. They just got down to what I call the business of creativity. Business being the operative word.
What’s this? Sacrilege! A creative talking about business?
Let’s just get put that old chestnut to rest once and for all. For years it was put about that creatives were only interested in winning awards. Bollocks. We get just as big a kick when sales go through the roof as we do when we win a Grand Prix. (Okay, maybe not as big, but still a kick).
But back to the business of creativity. There’s three parts to really successful creative work.
One, it wins awards. Two, it succeeds in the marketplace. And three, people like and talk about the advertising. Now it’s relatively easy to achieve one or two; most advertising does. But to achieve all three is the holy grail.
And that’s why the Jim Beam campaign was such a satisfying win, because it achieved all three. It won awards (although, naturally not our own AWARD, heaven forbid); it was loved by the punters; and it grew the business. Three strikes…
All of the Direct Cannes winners from Australia had ideas. One idea was a stick. With a letter attached. But it was a stick, not just a letter.
Our campaign was built around the idea of a helpline for blokes. But it wasn’t a real helpline, it was a send-up. To the AWARD judges who thought the campaign was too blokey—see, you missed the point entirely.
Unfortunately, a lot of Direct lacks ideas. A letter in a DL envelope is not an idea. It’s a nuisance. Cheap, yes. Effective, no. Think of your own experience. How much junk do you get in the mail? Dear Valued Customer, blah, blah, blah, exclusive offer, limited time, blah, blah…
Scrumple, scrumple. Bin.
People don’t trust strangers. They don’t give them their money. Even if the offer is too good to be true. People just say, “That sounds too good to be true”.
People buy stuff from companies they know and trust. And when it comes to trust, family comes first, followed by friends.
So the notion of targeting individual consumers and hoping they’ll trust your advertising is misguided. Instead of one piece of communication hitting one consumer, the Jim Beam campaign was designed to get people talking to one another. John Grant, author of New Marketing, calls this “encircling”—surrounding consumers with an idea, then letting them do the selling.
This is exactly what happened with the “Jim Beam 1900” campaign. People got talking. All we did was create the spark of an idea. We let consumers turn it into a fire. They got the idea and ran with it—literally. Stories came back of blokes charging into poncy hairdressers and slapping the 1900 Helpline number on their mate’s forehead while they were getting their hair cut. We’d conveniently printed up loads of stickers and left them in bars and bottle shops with a message encouraging punters to do so.
Call me old fashioned but I reckon if you do ads people like, that meet business objectives and win the occasional award—that’s the business. At least that’s the business I’m in.
Another old-fashioned and well-mannered habit is to actua-lly give credit where credit’s due. So, because success has a thousand fathers, here’s the definitive list of those who were responsible for the campaign: Chris Round, Phil Shearer, Andrew Baxter, Lucinda Thaw, Jasper van der Schalie, Sarah Macauley, Rob Galluzzo and Jason Young.
The last word, however, should go to two great clients; Phil Baldock and Frank Cohen who said, “We are absolutely delighted that what we believed was an extremely successful and innovative campaign has been recognised as the very best campaign of its type produced anywhere in the world in 2003. It’s well done to all involved for their passion behind the Jim Beam brand and the 1900-9-Jim Beam campaign”.
Shaun Branagan was the Creative Director on the Grand Prix winning Jim Beam campaign.
