I accidentally caught the TalkTalk ‘This Stuff Matters’ ad on TV yesterday evening. I’m a committed pause/FF TV watcher but this one leapt out at me, made me stop, rewind and replay. It’s a fly-on-the-wall/day-in-the-life story of a family who live at 9 Merwick Street, Somewhereorother. It was filmed over two weeks by unmanned cameras. It features both spilt milk and crying, though not at the same time. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.
I love it.
Why?
It’s authentic. It’s actual TalkTalk customers doing everyday at-home stuff like watching TV, mucking around on social media, texting, phoning. Mum probably had make-up on when she might not normally, but no one can stay constantly conscious of hidden cameras for two weeks. The edit of unscripted cameos feel real – because they are real. What comes through is genuine love, mischief, mishaps, laughter.
TalkTalk is an ISP so normally, you know, Y::A::W::N. Media, phone and social media technology is so integrated into normal life that we never marvel or appreciate it. The tone of the ad is TalkTalk’s surprise and spontaneous recognition at how much all their tech-supporting infrastructure matters to everyday life. This ‘surprise’ is a bit of advertising sophistication, of course. But the fact remains – it’s still true that tech makes our social world go around, and therefore the message is heart-warming. This brand recognises its value in customers’ lives, and reminds the rest of us too. I wonder what they’ll do with this insight, beyond the ad campaign?
Companies that recognise what makes their brands, products and services matter most to their customers are surprisingly rare. Often the job of identifying exactly why customers value them and what they could be proud of, is outsourced to agencies. In this case the excellent Chi & Partners, long-term agency for TalkTalk. But shouldn’t this job be innate to companies themselves? Actually part of their core business? Shouldn’t it form part of the function, part of the brief, to every department in the company?
If it’s not, and it rarely is, it helps to have someone or a team either already native or willing to go native, to uncover and enliven the authentic bits of the business’s brand.
It’s brand rebirth midwifery. It requires determination, compassion, energy, intellect, learning and the rolling-up of sleeves.
I’ve done both – been native and gone native. I co-founded one of the first wave of new gins, in 2003. Blackwood’s Gin, ultimately sold to Distil Plc, was born authentic – admittedly because there wasn’t any money in our start-up for anything fancy. We couldn’t even afford the cost of running the labelling machine at the bottlers (where they put the gin into our bottles, seal them, and usually add the blinking labels). For the first batch, we hand-labelled every single bottle, overnight, before selling direct to consumers at shows all over the UK. That unwelcome sleep-deprivation reaped huge commercial reward – we sold loads which meant we could afford to treat ourselves to the labelling machine for the next batch. But the unintended authenticity of that hand-labelling wasn’t the heart of our gin’s brand, that was just a bit of start-up back-story.
It was this – the botanicals that we distilled into Blackwood’s Gin were hand-picked in Shetland. An annual hand-harvest of natural botanicals from this stunning, fresh, remote and wholly unique county of Scotland. The ratio of the different botanicals varied depending on what flourished best in each unpredictable Shetland summer. It was the world’s first ‘vintage’ gin.
This was our product and brand story. With it we sold our gin to consumers at shows; and to retailers including Sainsburys, Tesco and Co-Op; and to trade and wholesale partners around the world. For example our simple authentic story accelerated us from zero to a joint venture with Fosters Group (now CUB) in Australia and New Zealand within six months, and to UK Trade & Industry New British Exporter of the Year just 15 months after launching.
Authenticity that started with the brand, and resulted in exceptional sales.
Later I fell in love with Gumtree. I went native to create their first ever UK-wide ad campaign to celebrate their tenth birthday in 2010. I discovered a much-loved business that had grown so quickly and so far that it definitely knew what it did, but not why it did it. ‘Online classifieds’ doesn’t set the pulse racing, does it?
I talked to the team, the amazing and brilliant team. The geeks, the producers, customer services, marketers, sales. It wasn’t a huge team at that point, still fitting on one floor of one building on the much-loved eBay campus. It was one of the sales team (I think Murray Phillipson, now at Sovrn) who when I asked him his pitch to his clients said, “Gumtree is everyone’s local noticeboard.” Ahhhhhhh – got it! Suddenly, and from right there inside the company – where it had always been, waiting to be uncovered – was the meaning, usefulness and common language for the brand. Easy to comprehend. We all know why we’d use a local noticeboard.
As the idea developed, we decided to cast the campaign from the team at Gumtree which visually bolstered the authenticity in our message. Here’s a PDF of the full set of London tube ads, featuring teammates gumtree-tube-cards-2010.
The aim of the campaign was to persuade lapsed users to consider Gumtree again, and to bring new buyers and sellers to the brand. The commercial result was that we reached over two million live listings for the first time ever, providing a massive revenue boost. (Gumtree has rebranded since, in 2016.)
All three brands – TalkTalk, Blackwood’s Gin and Gumtree – identified their authentic soul. From the outside it’s seemingly effortless because it all rings true, it all comes from an authentic place within the businesses. This gives the companies permission to speak to consumers in a way that glossy productions often can’t. Maybe the shine of high-gloss blinds us a bit?
All three companies were brave and visionary enough to highlight authentic elements of their brands to deliver a commercial objective. TalkTalk to recover trust following a data breach. Blackwood’s Gin to become a fast-growing challenger brand. Gumtree to deliver a step-change in sales revenue.
As ‘authenticity’ continues to develop from being a brand buzzword into a recognised and valuable business asset, the cleverer companies look within themselves and to their customers to uncover ways to unleash latent value and create new and true commercial opportunities.
This stuff matters.
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