CHEP Network was faced with a problem last year. Its client Samsung was looking for a way to reach Gen Z — reportedly the most ad-sceptical generation of all — and let them know about its new Galaxy Z Flip 4.
However, the CHEP team noticed a growing clamour online about how to avoid or subvert the ads shown on digital platforms via the algorithm — the looming, faceless, insidious lines of code that govern our online experiences. But, by “flipping” the traditional targeted advertising model on its head, CHEP created a competitive “internet sport” where punters actively sought out the ads to try and win one of the new phones.
The results were impressive — search volume about the phone was up 133 per cent compared to the next-best performing campaign and the campaign achieved a 34 per cent increase in sales and 600 per cent higher engagement than the industry standard. Metal — including the Best Digital Campaign gong at last year’s B&T Awards — followed too.
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Ahead of this year’s B&T Awards, we caught up with CHEP chief creative officer, Gavin McLeod to find out what the flipping hell they were thinking at the agency.
B&T: This was a fairly unusual campaign idea. Where did it come from?
Gavin McLeod: Samsung launches are well-orchestrated machines. A lot of things are rinse and repeat every year — though we put a creative lens on them. But within the launch, the most interesting brief is what Samsung calls the Disrupt brief and credit to Samsung, they put money behind something that has an outsized impact on the outside world.
The intent [of “Flipvertising”] is to do something different that disrupts the market and positions Samsung at the forefront of innovation.
B&T: How did Samsung react when you presented the idea?
GM: We didn’t present it in isolation but as part of our creative issues session with the client — which I’m a big fan of. I can remember clearly that we had about 12 very high-level ideas pinned on the wall and this was just one of those very interesting ideas.
The most interesting part of this idea was what happened down the track and how you can get people to hack the algorithm. The idea was simple but the process to get there was a really long and complicated one because no one knew how to do it. When the client saw the ideas, what became “Flipvertising” was the one that they gravitated to.
It’s a huge credit to Samsung. They’re a client that gives the agency a lot of creative freedom at the right moments.
B&T: A lot of far-too-complicated data work for B&T to understand was fundamental to the campaign. How was CHEP able to deliver this when many traditional creative agencies might struggle?
GM: I don’t think this idea could have been executed by a traditional agency because it did require data teams and media teams to be integral in the idea.
Once Samsung had approved the idea and, again, it was a very high-level idea, just a one-page thing we put on the wall — we had called together different disciplines into the room, strategy, data, media, tech and obviously creative and we talked about how we thought it might come to life and what we needed to make it happen.
We pulled together a core team but one person really made this idea, Hansen [Ding] in our performance media team, he was pulled in because of his expertise in the space. He became an integral part of the creative process as well. The divide between creative and other disciplines became irrelevant, it was just a core team working towards making it happen.
It was a massive credit to Hansen that this campaign worked. For the entire idea to work, we really needed to understand how the Google algorithm worked in terms of performance media. We worked really closely with Google and they came up with a bunch of theories on how it could work.
It was actually a volume game because the number of people doing it would be quite small. You would search and it would trigger an ad that you would see, then it would trigger another one, and we didn’t know at what point the algorithm would trigger the first ad.
It’s interesting that Google didn’t know themselves but Hansen, because he’s been working in performance media for a very long time, he has all these outlandish theories about how the algorithm works and he was right! If I were going to pay someone to work on my brand, I would pay him a lot of money because anyone who really understands how the algorithm works can be so valuable to clients.
I really enjoyed it. I love working on things where you learn something new and you see someone who is a really creative thinker but within a specific skill set that you wouldn’t necessarily think was creative.
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B&T: What makes this, and other award-winning creative, stand out from the crowd?
GM: It’s interesting coming back from Cannes, where “Flipvertising” won the Social & Influencer Lion last year, the first thing that struck me was that there’s a degree of bravery in all the award-winning work. That bravery isn’t from the agency, it’s easy for an agency to be brave, but it’s a lot harder for a client to be brave.
I think of all the work that I saw at Cannes and the thing that stood out was that a client had to take a leap of faith. That was certainly the case with “Flipvertising.” The leap of faith was whether we could do it and once we’d started doing it, we weren’t sure how the Google algorithm was actually going to react because we really had to hack the algorithm. And nobody actually knows how that works — even the people at Google!
That bravery came to the fore at a point where it wasn’t working how we thought it was going to. We had an emergency meeting and we presented two options to Samsung — pull the campaign or keep going because we thought we had the theory worked out but we didn’t know if it would. To their massive credit, Samsung stayed the course and it started working and it was a brilliant success.
But the single biggest thing is that an idea that cuts through by definition requires bravery, particularly on the client side.
B&T: Why did you choose to enter the B&T Awards?
GM: It’s a good question. It’s important that we support our local industry and I think it’s particularly important that we support publications like B&T because they’re a yardstick of news and information and promoters of the industry.
I like the fact that the B&T Awards judges are compiled from a broader cross-section of the marketing industry as well. It’s interesting that it isn’t the very pointy end of creative people judging it. It’s clients.
[Reader, please rest assured that B&T did not pay McLeod to say any of that].
B&T: And it might win you some new clients?
GM: It has in the past!
Are you at the top of your game? Entries to the B&T Awards 2024 are open now!
