5 lessons from winning ‘Best Use of Creative’
We’ve been chasing the highly coveted ‘Best Use of Creative’ B2B Marketing award for several years now, and we’ve finally bagged it with one of our clients, the global law firm Addleshaw Goddard.
So we thought we’d share some of the lessons we learned from winning the award, and how to create work that’s unforgettable.
Prefer to watch rather than read? We talked about some of this at B2B Marketing’s Global ABM Conference, which you can also watch here.
HOW TO MAKE IT UNFORGETTABLE
1. THE BEST CREATIVE STARTS WITH GREAT INSIGHT
Addleshaw Goddard had commissioned a piece of research, interviewing senior executives to do so. And it was this research that unearthed the golden nugget which inspired our creative – that big strategic projects are more harmonious when members of the General Counsel (in-house legal teams) are included in the boardroom.
This insight ensured we weren’t just repeating well-trodden topics, and gave our creative the greatest chance of resonating with the target audience.
2. DO THE UNEXPECTED
With this insight, it would have been easy to have created a traditional campaign, knock up the usual social adverts and white paper and go from there.
Luckily for us, Addleshaw Goddard didn’t want to do that. They wanted to embrace the unexpected. And so we hit upon the creative idea that ‘a boardroom without the GC’s input is like a piece of music without all the notes: incomplete and unharmonious’. We wrote three unique songs, each containing the notes G and C. But we constructed the songs in such a way that meant we could remove those two notes and change the meaning of the song from a positive one, to a negative one: harmony with GC, and chaos without.
Music is under-utilised in B2B (we all know the stereotypical B2B video jingle), but as this campaign shows, this doesn’t need to be the case.
3. GO WHERE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE IS
Video was intrinsic to this campaign, and that’s because YouTube is a top-performing channel for informing B2B purchasing decisions (according to Gartner in 2023). So our campaign was in a format and a channel that had the best chance with our audience. We weren’t expecting Beyonce-level viewing stats, but we did get 82,000 views in a few weeks, which helped to earn eight new pieces of client work. With notoriously long sales cycles in law, that’s quite a feat.
4. NURTURE A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY
Creativity needs to be nurtured. You can’t just demand that it delivers again and again without taking care of it. That’s why we provide ways to consistently inspire our teams. That includes weekly inspiration sessions every Friday where we share cool things (campaigns, art, music, film, anything), helping to embed habits that support creativity. It also means we’ve got great resources to turn to whenever we need it (Ads of the World, Creative Boom, It’s Nice That, and our very own Creative Hub are a few of our regulars).
Crucially, we weren’t alone with this ethos; Addleshaw Goddard not only wanted to do something different but had a track record of doing things differently too. Creativity really is a team effort.
5. MAKE IT REAL
Delivering thought leadership through songs gave Addleshaw Goddard an opportunity to create an experience around the research; a launch event was held where the findings were shared and the music was played. It certainly wasn’t your usual B2B roundtable.
So there you have it, the main learnings from winning the Best Use of Creative award at the B2B Marketing Awards.
If you’ve got big award-winning ambitions then we’d love to talk. Drop us an email at hello@digitalradish.co.uk.