How tell stories around sensitive subjects without exploiting them

Sensitive subjects are a fact of life for any brand, this could be anything from breaking bad news to your team, admitting your screw ups to customers or simply creating brand building content around a difficult topic or event like Covid-19.

When emotions are involved the lines between sensitive and insensitive become blurred, here are some of our top tips to help you stay out of hot water, and if done right, will help your brand connect with people on a deeper level -

Put your audience first

When dealing with a sensitive subject this is more important than ever, chances are your audience aren’t a carbon copy of you, so who are they? What content do they consume and enjoy? What are their hopes and dreams? What are their fears and doubts? - Only once you REALLY know your audience can you talk to them in their own language to truly curate a message that resonates on a deeper level.

Don’t beat around the bush

Your audience is smarter than you give them credit for, don’t try and pull a fast one on them or you’ll suffer the consequences. Our advice is to exercise ‘radical candor’ (shout out to Kim Scott, give the book a read!). At Mattr we think self awareness is one of single greatest, yet most under-used attributes a brand can have. If you mess up - come clean. If you’re selling something - admit it.

Simply put yourself in the shoes of your audience and hit their concerns and doubts head on ESPECIALLY when dealing with tricky subjects, just trust us on this one, you’ll thank us.

Keep it human

It's all too easy for a brand to hide behind glitzy graphics, snazzy voiceovers and dramatic footage but ultimately people connect with people so when broaching a tough subject keep your message human and speak from the heart, even if that means being vulnerable in front of your audience.

To allay doubts consider having a spokesperson, or multiple spokespeople to allow your audience to connect with your brand and message on a personal level.

Keep it real

When dealing with sensitive subjects authenticity is key and the easiest way to achieve this is by tapping into real stories and putting real people front and centre of your content. Forget fancy abstract arty creatives and fictional stories with actors and instead involve your customers, staff and everyday heroes to create a ‘bottom up’ rather than a ‘top down’ approach to your comms. Word to the wise though… steer clear of shoehorning your brand and message into this type of content, unadulterated stories will always work best.

Don’t take, give

Finally and most importantly think outside of the box when it comes to your marketing objectives, we get it, you have sales targets to hit and customers to convert but at Mattr we are big believers in good karma. A brand that gives back and invests in its audience will win the heart of that audience… and in turn that audience will one day become customers - and loyal ones too! So think about how you can provide value, whether that be useful advice, pure entertainment, giveaways, charitable donations or simply positive vibes in a dark time… like we’re doing in this blog ;)

BONUS THOUGHT: Stay Silent

Before you finish reading this and rush off to get creating content, just pause for a minute... sometimes the best thing you can do is to do nothing at all. Lush took this to the extreme last year by quitting social media all together but our personal favourite example is the thoughtful marketing pledge from the lovely folk at Bloom and Wild who are campaigning for ‘opt out’ options for email marketing around calendar dates that some customers find sensitive: https://www.bloomandwild.com/thoughtful-marketing-pledge

We write our monthly roundups in order to inspire a conversation around creativity, brand purpose, and the positive impact we can have on society. 

In the event of covid-19, the global pandemic that’s affected our lives so unpredictably, it’s important to celebrate the incredible efforts by brands out there supporting our health services and communities, as well as helping us be entertained during our collective effort staying at home.

So behold our roundup of brands offering their purposes for good during covid-19: 

Help Hiyacar offer free rides NHS workers

With essential travel coming to a standstill across London and elsewhere in the country - the good eggs at Hiyacar are now offering free car hires to NHS workers* to help them get around to hospitals and home at the end of a shift. Let’s help them spread the word about this to offer to the NHS across socials!

*dependent on ID and insurance of course! 

Please do share and get in touch if we can help 🙏🏻 #NHS #NHSheroes #keyworkers 💓 pic.twitter.com/WbnSmwjxjs

— Graeme Risby (@Risby1) March 24, 2020

Guinness’s content for St Patrick’s Day

This Covid-19 situation is an opportunity for brands to re-think about the way they’re talking to their audiences right now. A great example we found of this was this film by Guinness to celebrate St Patrick’s Day this year. 

They’re encouraging their audience to celebrate as normal, and foster their incredible spirit but from the comfort of their homes. It’s a fantastic use of their platform for good karma right now :)
(we actually did a deep dive into how to create great content like this combining UGC, previous assets and great stock here)

Brewdog and their hand sanitiser initiative

Brewdog have offered their distillery in Aberdeen to assist in the production and distribution of Punk Sanitiser. They’re still making beer, but diverted the majority of their stock to produce hand sanitiser, and as of this week have now distributed 50,000 units to NHS hospitals and local charities across the UK.

Deliveries and stock are being handled by extra team members from some of Brewdog’s closed bars - because “united we stand for better beer!”

BREWDOG SANITISER UPDATE:
Over 50,000 units have now been donated to the NHS & local charities (in any container we can get our paws on).

We've also enlisted extra team members from our closed bars to help us pack even more 💪https://t.co/2Yn9dbh2Gv pic.twitter.com/OlT9CEh10J

— BrewDog (@BrewDog) March 30, 2020

The Royal Academy of Art and their #RAdailydoodle

Galleries across the world are closed (and yet a Van Gogh painting was stolen in Amsterdam?!) but the Royal Academy of Art wants to make sure art is still accessible to everyone at home. 

So they’ve set up a daily drawing competition on Twitter, giving a daily challenge of different household items to get people drawing and be more creative! It started with legs of ham, but they’ve gone on to wardrobes and even workspaces… it’s a great way to engage people far and wide to be artistic, plus there’s some fun and witty commentary from their social media team on the masterpieces submitted :)

how about baked/glazed ham? 😊

(of course with pineapple & maraschino cherries!) #popart pic.twitter.com/AXjUvotP5o

— Julinda (@JulindaMorrow) March 18, 2020

Chip’s new saving techniques to help us during this pandemic

With so much uncertainty in the air it’s expected that many people will now be turning to  their savings, or looking at how much they can save while the brands and business around us is getting used to a new normal. 

Chip saw a massive increase in usage from the first week in March as people turned to their accounts to check on their affairs. And after such a spike, they’ve now introduced new saving techniques to help us during covid-19.  They’ve raised their saving limit to £10K, and even introduced a new personal algorithm that can help increase saving according to your income level… just doing the most to help people where they can at the moment using the tech available.

First Mile offering their services to deliver crucial goods to hospitals

I think we might have mentioned this before but we’re huge fans/users of First Mile in this office, they’re a brand doing great things for our environment and our wastage. 

And for the duration of covid-19, they’re offering their extra drivers and fleet available to deliver leftover food and wellbeing items from closing offices around London to the doctors and nurses at the UCLH. 

So if you know of any closing offices, like co-working spaces or even private offices who have perishables, or even cleaning items/sanitary items - let them know and they’ll be delivered to our frontline NHS medical staff!

Glastonbury’s donation of festival supplies to hospitals in the South West

The iconic festival would have celebrated 50 years this year, but for good reasons and to protect everyone’s safety it’s putting off the entire celebration to next year - but we’re not here to have a moan about how hard it is to get tickets!

There’s plenty of tributes and the BBC is setting up an entire digital Glastonbury experience to make up for it, but we wanted to highlight how the Eavis family have donated their entire medical supplies including masks, gloves, sanitiser and more intended for use in June, plus dedicated food provisions already in place, to hospitals across the Somerset county and South West.  It’s awesome and will be a huge help to guaranteeing supplies across the South.

Nicely done, Glasto https://t.co/BvP2tM0Suq

— Evening Standard Arts (@thestandardarts) March 25, 2020

Huggg open up e-vouchers to schools to help feed families

And last but definitely not least, we wanted to highlight what e-voucher start-up Huggg is doing to help in this crisis. They’re usually used for gifting, or even as an HR perk rewarding employees, but mainly stayed in the B2B sector. 

Now they’re opening up their platform to be used by schools to send vouchers to parents and families who rely on free school meals - and these vouchers can be used in supermarkets to redeem the equivalent food necessary to keep kids fed. As of this week it’s also open to charities too - to enable people in isolation to send supermarket vouchers to volunteers to collect groceries.

Their CEO Paul Wickers told the team that "it's been such a privilege to be able to put our resources to work on this important problem. We have our first schools up and running and are happy to open it up to any other schools and trusts looking for a solution while a central one is fixed. We're waiving all platform fees, schools will simply pay for the vouchers that get used and claim it back from the DoE."

Good news!😃@GOVUK has announced a central solution for distributing vouchers as an alternative to #freeschoolmeals.😃

We are already feeding thousands of children and will continue to provide schools with access to our platform if they need it.

— huggg (@huggg_uk) March 31, 2020

If you’ve seen any brands who are doing great things to help us all get through this difficult time, then let us know!

In the words of the NHS: Stay Home and Save Lives. Stay safe everyone x

Our top 5 ways to create video content remotely

It’s fair to say when it comes to video, nothing beats being on a film set. But the reality is there are certain times where you can’t… whether that’s due to budgets, timings, or because the world is self isolating and you’re having to work remotely!

So, we thought it would be useful to share a few tips on how you can still create quality video content, even in the most extreme situations:

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1. Encourage more user-generated content

Asking your team or customers to contribute footage to the film you’re making can be awesome for creating something that feels really authentic.

When it comes to sourcing the best footage, start by asking people to share content they’ve already shot on their phones or search for hashtags online and reach out to those creators to see if you can use their content.

If you’re looking for more specific shots, put together some clear instructions with example references you can share with people just to ensure the footage that comes back is usable! We’d also recommend a webinar style briefing session with all participants just to make sure any questions they have can be answered in one go.

This is exactly what we did with Lovecrafts and our Paintbox campaign and it worked a treat.

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2. Use your assets

“Repurposing” for repurposing’s sake is not something we encourage, but if you are really struggling to create anything new, we always encourage clients to look back into the assets we’ve created on set together and figure out how we can create something new out of what’s already there.

Grants did this really well with our above the line TVC campaign, taking the opportunity to use the ad to create more social content to bring into the new year.

Give something worth remembering. The gift of together. #TripleWoodTripleGood #GrantsWhisky pic.twitter.com/r2HqhelEUp

— Grant's Whisky (@Grantswhisky) November 14, 2019

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3. Take Stock

The dreaded word for any self righteous filmmaker, but actually in today’s world, leveraging stock to tell a story can be really effective.

We’re big fans of this for start ups who can’t necessarily afford everything being shot live and once you add a decent soundtrack, voiceover and any other bells and whistles, it can come out looking great. The key is to ensure the stock matches the tone of the message…for simple educational films, use sites that have huge asset libraries and a subscription model…

We’d recommend: https://www.videoblocks.com/

For a project that needs shots that are of a high quality, you may need to pay a premium for specific shots so use sites like: www.filmsupply.com which hosts content shot by cinematographers around the world.

Or if you are creating something comedic or more forgiving, we’d say own the cheese (like we did with Hiyacar) and look for old school shots and cartoon imagery that can be found on most cost effective sites.

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4. Let’s get animated

Probably the most obvious way to avoid live action shooting is creating an animation. To keep budgets and timings in line, remember it’s a two stage process… a storyboard is created and then these “still” assets are animated.

So make sure you’re really clear what you’re getting at the storyboard stage and avoid having to make changes after the animation starts! On the positives though, this can all be managed remotely…and if you have a script, VoiceOver artists can easily record remotely now too.

Here’s an example of this kind of project in play with Cambridge Audio:

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5. Hangout with your audience and/or team

Whether it’s Zoom, Skype or Google Hangouts, you have an opportunity to create some epic content out the endless meetings in your calendar. There’s an even greater opportunity to involve your customers/staff/fans who are also stuck at home and get them to record a message.

The best thing to do is send them a list of simple questions to answer so you can edit them together to be used in various ways - whether that be to generate written thought-leadership pieces on some of your challenges or even creating bitesize cutdowns to be used further down the line.

Check out this film made a while ago which we think shows the power of digital UGC very well:

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BONUS TIP: A Moving Image

One of the things we’ve been thinking about recently is how to re-think what a film can be - getting creative is all about how you can expand on the resource you have!

So consider the other elements you have at your disposal right now, whether that be through using audio, photography, titles and still graphics, or even combining all of these elements.

A great example of this is from one of our extended Mattr family, Director Miles Langley. We loved this brilliant film he created for International Women’s Day, where due to restrictions with availability of the participants, he cleverly combined photos and simple animation with some really personal voice recordings.

There are lots of other tips and tricks but hope that gives you a little bit of inspiration on your quest to create epic content whilst working remotely! If you have any questions on what you’re planning, feel free to get in touch and we’ll happily give you our two cents…

Our (now famous!) guide on how to create killer video content

We’re absolutely thrilled to be featured in Startups Magazine’s ‘Advertising and Branding’ Issue, the first edition of 2020!

It’s an awesome opportunity for us to really dive into how we work with our clients to tell meaningful and impactful stories - and share some of our biggest learnings across the whole process.

Scroll through to read our entire feature here:

Have a brief you want to chat through or you need some desperate help building out your content for the rest of this year?

Email josh@mattr.media and we’ll be in touch!

The top things that mattered to us in February

We’re back with our take on what’s happened during Feb that we think matters, and there’s been a lot going on in the world of purpose-led brands.

1) Ecover’s Laundry Against Landfill campaign

We’ve seen a huge momentum towards the end of last year of brands producing more impactful rallying cries - like this one we covered by Friends of the Earth last month. 

This month the spotlight was shone firmly on the huge amounts of material waste in the fashion industry, by Ecover’s Laundry Against Landfill campaign. We loved how their awareness piece is simply non-preachy yet effective, and how they’ve scaled the campaign to be multi touch-point, providing supplementary ‘how to’ guides on how to properly take care of our clothes on their site. 

Sara Mendez, Marketing Director at Ecover explained that  “with this campaign, we wanted to raise awareness of the problem of fashion waste. But also show people ways they can lessen their impact by falling back in love with the clothes they already own, keeping them in use, and out of landfill”.

2) Cans for Equity by BrewDog

It’s always interesting to see brands explore the ways they can attract and engage their superfans.

Look no further than what Brewdog have launched during Feb, with their Cans for Equity campaign - with the result being you can recycle 50 cans to become an ‘equity punk’ in Brewdog. 

This is such a great way to not just encourage behaviour change in the short-term, but also to show they care about their product at all stages through partnerships with First Mile to give their cans a second life. 

This initiative has created a more intimate perk for their superfans by feeling truly part of the brand, and we applaud it.

3) Sanctus’s campaign for Children’s Mental Health Week

This particular campaign is proof of how a creative can really thrive in the long-term. Sanctus, a brand providing mental health coaching businesses and individuals, decided to flip the script and create a film a couple of years ago on their socials for Children’s Mental Health Week. 

It made a comeback during the past month, and we wanted to highlight how much making this tonal switch on such a sensitive topic matters… it’s so great to see this from a brand with a more corporate audience. 

We spoke to George Bell, the brand and marketing lead at Sanctus who agrees that the power of the film also lies in the script. It’s comedic but authoritative on a subject when “all too often mental health is associated with images of someone sitting in a dark room clutching their head - this is, of course, part of mental health but it's not the full spectrum.”

“Although it's a couple of years old now, we still re-use it and still have a great response every time, which shows that it still remains uncommon for people to see mental health presented in this way.”

4) NHS x Notes to Strangers 

#notestonhs with @imalilo

411 Likes, 1 Comments - Andy Leek (@notestostrangers) on Instagram: "#notestonhs with @imalilo"

We’ve all seen these notes pop up around London over the years and one of our team is a huge fan, so we had put this in our highlight. 

Notes for Strangers started as an Instagram account by ex-creative Andy Leek, writing random notes on telephone boxes and bollards, spreading positivity and kindness where he noticed it’s severely lacking. 

This month we saw the launch of a collab with Notes to Strangers and the NHS, creating posters and notes for hospitals UK-wide to show support for nurses under severe stress. 

Hospitals tend to be a pretty bleak place and these notes are intended to spread positive messages at a time where political conversations are taking up much of the discourse around their work - it’s just a lovely thing to see.

5) ‘Meet the New Joby’ by Joby 

And finally in our roundup we wanted to include this really simple but effective repositioning campaign by Joby. If you don’t know who Joby are - they’re a tech brand that sells tripods for all different devices. 

We love how instead of putting their product front and centre, they hero their creators interacting with their product, weaving in UGC to add a mixed media element. 

It’s great to see Joby are exploring a new creative angle, becoming more experience-focused - so we’re looking forward to seeing their creative progression down the line!

Like what you’re seeing and want to create content that matters?

Email josh@mattr.media and let’s see what we can do...

BBB tips: The marketing tools marketers can't live without, how to cultivate a learning culture and choosing your external partner properly

It’s no secret, we love sharing the key insights from our breakfast roundtables. Here are the challenges shared from our last one:

Live by the 5 Why’s

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One person spoke about the importance of using the 5 why’s - an often forgotten exercise that is really useful when planning your content strategy. 

Why? 

Because it gets us to really question why someone would care about the content we are planning to produce.

Why?  

Because you’ll find insights and quirks that will help your content become more authentic and more ‘on-brand’

Why? 

Because this will help directly solve some of your comms challenges you’re facing with your audience

Why? 

Because you’ll stop creating content for content’s sake, or worse, content that isn’t achieving the results you want.

Why?

By implementing this process into every part of your marketing strategy you’ll be able to truly understand the core human motivation for the purpose of your content and why your audience is going to engage with it. 

You know what we mean?!

Test and learn, but don’t forget to give time to learning

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It’s great to see more companies integrate a “growth mindset” culture into their ways of working, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the content you produce. 

But one of our brand marketers confessed that while they test plenty and have weekly meetings to figure out what they’re trying next, they don’t truly allow for time to apply their learnings to it. It’s resulted in a cycle where things end up constantly being revised and sometimes making the same mistakes… 

One tip that was shared was to physically document your learnings all in one place and make it available for the whole team to access, essentially creating a publicly available wash-up deck (we’re huge fans of this and do this with each of our clients). But don’t write them just to forget about them the next day, re-visit them before you embark on a new project to remember what particular decisions might not always be wise. 

Another more collaborative and emotive version of this pitched to the table was to sit down with every team member involved (including your juniors!) and give each a voice on how they think the project fared.

Showcasing who your company is isn’t a crime

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A particular challenge that one marketer confessed is that while they may be good at talking about their products and services, they’re just not good at talking about themselves as a brand. 

As a result, some talk about their 1000 person company as if they’re ‘4 guys in a basement’. 

To truly solve this challenge, we discussed creating content that gives your stakeholders a voice, showcasing your team and champions your business for its practices not just its products. Of course there should be a balance but it’s no crime to show pride in the company you are a part of.

How to choose your external partners properly

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Of course we’ve all got horror stories about working with the wrong people and projects falling flat, so another topic that was discussed round our table (and a very interesting one as the only agency in the room!) was how marketing teams choose their external partners. 

A big tip was to trust your gut on whether the agency/partner you’re seeing would be a good cultural fit. Question their working process and especially quiz their buzzwords like “collaboration”  to find out what it tangibly looks like in reality.

Another marketer spoke about preferring partners who were honest and realistic about managing expectations as opposed to just being “yes men”. Understanding what can be achieved in given parameters is really important especially if you don’t have as much knowledge about the subject as the agency.  Having a partner interrogating your brief from an outsider’s perspective is healthy, as long as they can show they can provide plausible solutions…  

Dogs always win 

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And if all else fails, just shove a dog into your content… (in joke for those in attendance sorry all!)

Like what you’re reading and want to have your slice of the pie? Book a ticket to the next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie on March 11th. Only a couple of tickets left so book quick to eat a great breakfast and chat through everything going on right now.

Or, you can book yourself in for our new BONUS edition looking at the ins and outs of creating impactful video content on March 17th… 

Email sunnii@mattr.media if you’ve got any questions!

How to build a water-tight brief for you (and your agency partner!)

Writing a decent brief for both you and your agency partner is massively important. If done well, your brief should act as a touchstone for you both to create actionable instructions out of… it also ensures everyone is staying on course once the project is off the ground.

Trouble is, people aren’t really taught how to brief. So often important details can get left out and details that are supposedly set in stone change halfway through, leading to timely mistakes and costly errors.

This is definitely the case with video content, in spite of it probably being the most effective way to emotively connect with your audiences and educate them on why you exist.

Often video teams are often briefed at the “end” of planning phase… we’ve certainly felt this pain ourselves, and over the years have often had to rewrite briefs with the client to ensure the proposals we come up with are fit for purpose.

So, to save you time, stress and potentially money for when you’re putting your next video brief together, the below are some common details people leave out that are really important for your partners to understand:

1. Communicate your business challenge

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Often brands tell us the communication objective of their video project, but it’s even more important to understand what the underlying business problem is that has led to your decision to create this video.

One time we were asked to create a campaign for a client who needed to raise awareness with a new audience, but when we learnt that they also needed to drive sales once that audience landed on their website, the amount and type of content we delivered was reprioritised vs what we had been asked.

If we hadn’t have dug deep here, perhaps it wouldn’t have been as effective as it was.

2. Write down any relevant audience insights

Any audience insights you have to hand should be shared as part of the brief for the video.

Most briefs explain what the brand wants the audience to “know/feel/do” after watching the video, but it’s just as important to understand their mindset and what their painpoints are BEFORE they watch the video.

Frankly even if you don’t have large pools of research to hand, just informing the agency what these people love and worry about around your brand and the sector you work in is massively important to understand.

3. A deep dive into your budget

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No, this isn’t the point where you should say what budget you have, that should be a given.

However, you should also include information on what resource you have internally that could help with savings. This could be anything from team or customers who you could feature in the films, locations you could make available, team members who could support with anything during production or after.

Basically it’s worth putting down as that way the agency partner should be able to work out how to best spend the budget knowing all the tools they have at their disposal.

“TOP TIP: if the budgets allocated don’t match your ambitions, consider how you can look money together between your teams... ultimately if the content produced can help recruit new talent or sales teams use in meetings, they should contribute towards the project.”

4. Use the brief to think about how you can scale the campaign

What else are you doing beyond this video to drive the action you want? Are you creating supporting content for the viewer after they watch the video we are being asked to create? What about a landing page that stores some of that info you can drive traffic to and capture emails from? Is there a social competition being created to drive further engagement?

When we say we create “scalable” video this is how we think and often the client is thinking this way too, so let your agency partner know...it can spark new ideas and sometimes additional content that can be captured on set to support your plans.

5. Explain to your partner what types of internal resource are and aren’t available

Can't stop, won't stop, please stop

Following on from this, explain to your video partner what internal resource can support their work. Do you have in house pr or paid media taken care of? What about social community management? Graphic design? It’s great to know this can be leveraged and if you don’t your video partner should have its own decent network of partners they work with to help plug the gaps.

There are plenty of other elements to building out a brief. And whilst we can share briefing templates to help you with this, we also run complimentary briefing workshops to ensure absolutely nothing is missed out. If you’re interested in having one, just get in touch with josh@mattr.media

The top things that have mattered to us in January

We’re back with our monthly roundup of campaigns, content and activations that we feel are making a difference to our world…

1. Hiyacar’s back to life

Hiyacar are in an exciting position as a high-growth spearheading a new sector of the car sharing market. And up until this point, they’ve been having to subsidise the majority of peer to peer insurance costs for drivers as that’s the sector norm. But when their insurance provider came back in late December with further increases to pricing for their drivers and no further changes to the claim policy -  they took the decision to cease trading for a couple of months. 

They’re happy to announce that they fully restored their service as of this week, but we wanted to reflect on how awesome their customer service was during this period of closure. They went out of their way to speak to each driver and owner in their community to personally explain the issue - and to people who couldn’t rent during this period, they gave them 50% of the funds it would have cost to rent a replacement with competitors service providers. 

It couldn’t have been easy, but they went above and beyond for their community, proving their mettle as a company which is not prepared to ‘grow at all costs’. Rob Larmour, their COO & Co-founder told Team Mattr that “the response we received from our members and from other companies who saw not only what we did by making a stand but how we handled the aftermath for our drivers and owners, has been fantastic. Being open and allowing everyone to see what goes on behind the scenes showed that we won't compromise our values for growth.”

2. Friends of the Earth’s newest campaign tackling eco-anxiety 

Eco-anxiety is a bit of a hot topic right now and this brilliant film for Friends of the Earth created by Don’t Panic is an awesome way to bring the conversation to life. We’ve been hugely inspired by this approach to raising awareness.

By sensationalising the heroine’s chase to win her plastic bottle back, Friends of the Earth have figured out how to communicate and tackle the topic of doing your bit for the planet without being preachy. With so many stats flying about on how many years we’ve got left and how much work is still left to be done, it’s easy to get caught up -  but take a leaf from this ad and start doing your own bit to help.

3. First Direct ‘money wellness’ TTL campaign & social content series

We believe money is a wellness issue. Let's challenge how money makes us feel. #moneywellness

22 Likes, 1 Comments - first direct (@firstdirect) on Instagram: "We believe money is a wellness issue. Let's challenge how money makes us feel. #moneywellness"

We’ve seen some great ads over the years that focus on the difficulty of talking about money openly and confidently, like ‘The M Word’ by Lloyds Bank. Now First Direct have come out with their latest campaign looking at the concept of ‘money wellness’ in our everyday realities. 

To accompany their OOH billboard ads, they’ve also produced a new social video content series interviewing their existing customers and how they are trying to be more ‘money healthy’. 

It’s great to see the huge highstreet finance players take part in an unscripted conversation around financial pressure, a trend that has definitely not been appreciated before. We’re huge advocates for brands leaning on their real people to tell real stories, so adding new perspective to the ways in which we’re improving our health in our lives is incredibly impactful.

4. Hubbub’s coffee cup installation exposes just how much waste coffee cups produce

Hey London! It's your last chance to visit our brew-tiful coffee cup recycling installation on the riverwalk close to the Tate Modern (which means it's your last chance to get swallowed up in a incredible cave of geometrical cups). Will we see you there? It will be there until Sunday 2nd February in a major push to raise awareness around coffee cup waste (we go through 5,555 cups every minute in the UK!) and to signal the new bespoke recycling bins around town and the rest of the country. Coffee cups are lined with a sneaky plastic film, you see, and they need to be separated from other paper goods in order to be recycled correctly. See you at the installation and let's keep coffee cups #InTheLoop

339 Likes, 18 Comments - H U B B U B (@hellohubbub) on Instagram: "Hey London! It's your last chance to visit our brew-tiful coffee cup recycling installation on the..."

We’re all guilty of using coffee cups without realistically considering if they’re going to have a second life. To combat this behavioural habit, environmental charity Hubbub have created an installation to showcase the 5,555 cups used per minute in the UK - compared to the 222 of those that are actually recycled in the existing processes. 

Natasha Gammell, the project lead at Hubbub, told us that “at 3 metres tall and illuminated at night, the structure is unmissable, swallowing visitors up in thousands of geometrical cups. The installation has evolved into a fully interactive public artwork as the thousands of people who pass the installation each day write down their visions for a greener world on the cups.”

Hubbub and Starbucks have contributed over £300K to creating new recycling centres across different boroughs that will uniquely process coffee cups, exploring new ways of regenerating the used plastic. We loved the idea for such an aesthetic visual to raise awareness for such a widespread issue - and there’s immense possibilities to create new and impactful content around the outcome. Watch this space!

Liked what you’re reading and want to create content that matters?

Get in touch at josh@mattr.media

BBB tips: working on communications between teams, when to consider a re-brand, and how to create a genuinely engaged community

We’re back from another great instalment of Brand, Bitch & Brekkie, with plenty of fresh insights to share from the real-world challenges our community of purpose-led brands find themselves in.

Changing the mindset internally towards to your marketing team

We’ve touched on this briefly before in previous roundtables, but there is no one-size-fits-all answer to helping your internal teams work more efficiently together. But what we have noticed is that the usual tension lies between how each team is perceived in terms of the value they add (explored further in “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni).

An interesting method to resolving this, for one particular brand, was to have the marketing team sit in on sales meetings and vice versa. This helped ensure an understanding of what types of collateral were integral to guarantee sales and the loyalty of customers, and essentially drew a line in the sand to what shouldn’t be changed or branded as ‘not on brand’ - making sure all voices are heard.

Understanding the red flags that can help identify if you need to consider a re-brand

When you’re starting a business and your team is small, everyone knows each other, your brand and its values so intimately. But naturally, as you grow, new faces join the team and many of them won’t really know who you are or what you really stand for.

Several guests shared their experiences of why this was a problem: 

1. “If it’s not resonating with us, how are our customers going to understand it?” 

2. “I sat down with 10 different people, and nobody could tell me what we actually do” -

3. “OK they say, I get it you’re purpose-driven, but now what?” 

For a lot of the people around the table, it became necessary to go through a rebrand process with the aim of ensuring their values, tone of voice and general ways of working matched up with the vision they had for the company...interestingly the most successful of these processes was done extremely collaboratively with the whole team and became the benchmark to plan all communications out of.

Taking the steps to build a genuine community

Creating a genuinely engaged and involved community is something that many brands struggle with. It’s a tricky field to navigate and execute properly - as engaging each of your users/customers face-to-face is a big leap. But luckily, we had some fairly experienced guests round the table who could spill secrets on their success...

A great example of this from one of our guests round the table was through a closed Facebook community - but they take care to make sure the channel isn’t a free for all. The brand’s marketing team are admins, and the only ones who can post, but their audience can like and comment to their heart‘s content. These parameters essentially protect their digital community space from becoming another customer service channel, and also cultivate a very authentic channel to communicate to their community, when organising face to face meetings is next to impossible. 

Another brand told us of how they host monthly pub sessions for their brand ambassadors.  This brand prides itself on the fact that the ambassador roles are volunteered by their community, so as a reward and a way of getting insight to their guerrilla outreach, what could be better than going to the pub? They recommended this method as a way to boost your company culture and exchanging ideas straight from the eyes and ears of your brand’s community.

Be open about sharing everything, even if you think it isn’t a big deal 

But having the foundations for building a community isn’t enough - and one guest fought this argument with a pretty great idea. 

Using the digital medium above, they’ve actually benefited from their community being directly involved in their business decisions. As an example, they’ve collaborated on working files of brand guidelines and tone of voice documents, product initiatives and web designs, even down to the design and layout of a button on their app because of free flowing feedback. 

It’s been an adjustment to create an additional feedback round in all these processes, but it’s led to a huge amount of brand loyalty and investment in their brand. It’s a lesson to us all to be open about allowing your community to help make decisions that you might not consider important or be able to resolve internally.

AND we host a great roundtable breakfast for our community of purpose-led brand marketers: they’re small, intimate and exclusive - and works a treat to see your beautiful faces.

We’ve got our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie on Feb 11th, and there’s a couple of tickets left. 

Book yourself in here OR email sunnii@mattr.media to find out more!

BBB tips: sit down with your customer, use your mission to empower your colleagues & how to acknowledge your competitors

It’s a brand new decade - and what better way to start than to share learnings from the last Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable to add to your list of OKR’s and personal goals for the year ;) 

In this edition, we delve into how to get your customer more involved in your brand journey, why being vulnerable with your colleague will build trust, how to approach bigger competitors in your comms and the holy trio of truths to abide when defining your purpose. 

Take the time to sit down with your customer

A couple of our attendees confessed to getting carried away with what they assumed their customers wanted from their brand, without actually having the data and proof to back it. They also confessed to relying on their analysis of social and digital engagement with their content, which can be easily subjective and interpreted differently from person to person.

Ultimately, meeting your customers face-to-face and eliminating screens is the answer. One marketer found that by bringing together people in small focus groups, they discovered unique audience quirks, commonality in things they worried about all of which the brand hadn’t considered based on digital data.

And if time is lacking, one top tip was to create a quarterly brand health checker to distribute to your community online. Ideally, the survey lists up to 10 questions to understand what your customers love at the moment, but also where they think your brand needs to be in the future. It’s this data that will help you get your comms to be working as efficiently as you need it to be.

Be more transparent to better your company culture

At Mattr, we’re always encouraging our clients to showcase their brand authentically in their external comms. But one of our guests raised a great point that it is just as important to be vulnerable and authentic when communicating internally too. 

We’ve seen that the start-up world is particularly prone to being an emotional rollercoaster, especially as many start up brands today may not be around tomorrow. The conversation around the future of your company is difficult to face, so being honest and transparent with your employees is vital to making sure everyone is fully on board and know how important their roles and responsibilities are to make the mission succeed. Our guest recommended “Radical candor” ( a book by Kim Scott) as a great tool to read when approaching difficult conversations.

Another great approach was to initiate monthly OKR’s to help track the progress of your specific role and responsibilities in terms of the bigger picture business goals. This is really rewarding for all involved and certainly something we’re embracing as a team in 2020.

Taking on bigger companies negatively in your comms isn’t always the way forward

For those who read our content regularly you’ll know we’re all about supporting the challenger brands who are changing the status quo. But doing this successfully in your comms doesn’t need to come from by attacking what’s come before. 

Your product might be disruptive, but displaying an ambushing attitude in your external comms makes your customers think you’re focused on beating the competition and not about addressing the bigger picture about what the future could look like. 

Instead, by empowering your audience to make a change in their habits and spinning a positive light on the future and respecting competitors who’ve come before you, you will earn more respect in the long term.

Know your human truth, organisation truth and sector truth  

This sentiment came from one of our guests who revealed that identifying these truths had helped them navigate a tricky organisation wide re-brand. 

To dissect this into three parts: 

Interrogating their human truth (essentially what their audience thought about them) helped them face their realities of how their products/services weren’t performing, and what they could do better, for their community directly.

Their organisation truth (focusing on what the needs of the internal departments are) opened up conversations with stakeholders at every level of the brand, to establish what needs to change to enable the business to do what it says on the tin. 

And using these two truths finally looking at their sector truth (the position of the brand within their industry vs the competition).

While their re-brand isn’t finished yet, revealing all of these hard-hitting facts and truths has helped break down the brand’s values and purpose into digestible goals for all internal stakeholders, not just the brand + marketing team.

Feel like these conversations relate to your challenges you’re facing at the moment, and want to get involved? 

Join us at our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable in February. Email sunnii@mattr.media or call her on 07772343952 to book a place!

Looking back over our f**k-ups of 2019 - what a year..

Why is it when we get to the the holiday season, most companies only talk about the things that have gone well that year? The road to your success is paved in mistakes and failure, so in spite of some amazing things that have happened, this article wants to do something more real and raw, focusing on our 4 biggest f*ck ups of the year and what we’ve learnt from them.

Our hope? Whether you’re a brand marketer or agency partner, the below will encourage you to share your own failures from this year. It’s these things that have ultimately got us all to where we are today.

Learn to say no by coming back to your mission

2019 has been challenging for many reasons and I am not shamed to admit, we have had some real tough moments this year. When times are tough, it becomes difficult to say no to things you would usually ignore. But the trouble with this more reactive attitude is if were to fast forward 5 years, you may end up with a company that differs from the vision you had when you started it.

Of course any brand journey requires some level of flexibility, but if like us you believe in brand purpose it’s critical to recognise when you’re slipping down this road. That’s why we’ve spent a lot of time recently checking back in with our values to ensure they are at the core of all the decisions we make, from the customers we work with, the team we hire, to the value we provide people beyond our services. We even have our own criteria checklist for jobs that come in, to act as a guide so that if times get tough again we are consciously making a decision, not just doing so because we feel we need to.

Make sure stakeholders feel a part of your project, not just people who green light it.

There have been a couple of projects this year with really drastic last minute requests. On reflection, it’s been because of a combination of being rushed into delivering a project for tight deadlines or because certain stakeholders were not informed about the creative route we had agreed to, until they actually saw the end product.

Drastic last minute changes can be painful for all involved- for the client it can lead to lengthy delays on delivery times, additional fees or worse. If the changes are impossible to make, then you’re in dangerous waters of producing an under-par campaign or even canning the whole project. And for your agency partner this situation is also really tough: agencies always want clients to be thrilled with their work, but there’s only so much one can do once everything has been filmed.

There’s nothing worse than thinking “if only we knew this in the briefing stage”. So ultimately we’ve learnt it’s absolutely critical to ensure all stakeholders have not just signed off on ideas but are actively involved too...

When agreeing on responsibilities, ensure people really understand the tasks they’re taking on

The nice thing about working so collaboratively with clients is a shared sense of responsibility when it comes to getting a project done, none more-so than when budgets are tight and we are all looking for ways to make savings. Often a way to do this is for clients to take up the mantle of organising talent, finding locations or even supplying props and wardrobe on the day.

Most of the time this strategy has worked to aplomb, but sometimes clients haven’t quite understood the resource required to carry out the work they’ve taken on. A good example of this is when we are looking for user generated content as part of the narrative. It’s really important to factor in the necessary time to source this internally because it usually takes longer than you expect to get customers (or even staff) to do things for you.

So, have an honest and frank chat with your agency partners about what’s entailed in the work you’re committing to before doing it, work out what gives you the best chance of completing it without delay and sometimes if the conclusion is actually you don’t have the resource to do so, paying that little bit more goes a long way.

Try to speak the language of the person you’re talking to…particularly with email!

I sent an email earlier this year to a client of ours. It was sent with positive intentions, was tapping into a subject we thought we could help with and was framed as an opportunity that we thought could be really exciting. Yet it was only after we received their response- highlighting the negative impact it could have on them personally- that we realised we’d f*cked up an otherwise great idea.

The reality is, if we’d really considered the language we used, we’d be looking at a very different outcome. The matter was resolved swiftly, but naturally the opportunity was dead. To say we learnt a lot from that experience is an understatement. In emails, your tone can be misinterpreted, there is no context behind the words you are writing and once you’ve sent an email, it can’t be unsent…So whether it’s to a client, a supplier, colleague or boss, you should never send an important email without putting yourself in the shoes of the person receiving it. And better yet, maybe just have a call or meeting if it’s that important!

Thank you to everyone whose allowed us to fail emphatically this year. It’s allowed us to grow as content creators and human beings. As we look forward to 2020, I’m sure there will be even more lessons to learn. 

p.s. please feel free to share your biggest mistakes of 2019!

Top 4 things that have mattered to us this November

At Mattr we believe that in today’s world the best brands do so much more than sell products. Below are four of our fave examples over the last month:

1. In a world where men wear the tampons - Thinx

We’re all witness to the changing conversation around femcare - its inclusion in political manifestos, new product innovation, and now the latest advertising campaign by Thinx. 

Their new TV & social film depicts a hilarious world where men wear the tampons and deal with having their period. There are no corny sport skits or women wearing white - instead we’re privy to a son telling his dad he’s got his period for the first time, male colleagues handing out spare tampons, and a tampon string peeking out of a guy’s boxers. 

While we think this ad is awesome for its rebellious and hilarious nature, it actually matters because the heart of the narrative is helping normalise sensitive and everyday experiences. Creating impactful content in the femcare space (as we learned through our film with myFreda) is tough to nail but can be powerful when you do!

2. The Twitter community’s power for good - Football Beyond Borders

The girls are all kitted up for fixture evening 1! ⚽💪🏻

A team: Kiaira, Gracie, Maddison, Esme, Imogen, Daisy, Esmae

B Team:, Lisa, Willow, Kirah, Lottie, Maisy, Gracie, Carla.@BHA_TQ#remarkablelives #girlsfootball #womensfootball pic.twitter.com/VI72vEvVtd

— Barton Hill Academy Girls Football (@barton_girls) November 11, 2019

Campaign reported a story we loved this month about Barton Hill Academy, a primary school in Devon. Their girl’s football team had no kit of their own, with budget dedicated to the boy’s kit leaving the girls to wear the outgrown hand-me-downs. 

Their coach involved Football Beyond Borders, an education charity dedicated to helping disadvantaged kids get into sport, who took to Twitter’s biggest community to get support from athletes and sponsors  to raise funds for a new kit for the girls’ squad. Within 15 minutes new sponsorship and endorsement from Nike and West Ham Women’s Football squad had sorted free kit for all young ladies. 

When we talk about using your audience to help your brand live and celebrate its purpose, this is a great example to remember. It’s all about Listening to your community and acting on what mean the most to them.

3. Brewing for clean water - Brewgooder

TUESDAY CHALLENGE! Tag a brewer you want us to work with below 👇 ⠀ Yesterday, we launched the Brewgooder Global Gathering 🌍🍻 We're using the power of craft beer to unite 500 brewers around the world, to each create a one-off beer for World Water Day weekend in March 2020 💧 ⠀ This collaboration will help impact the lives of 100,000 people, and we already have 129 breweries signed up! Who else should we get involved? Tag them below! ⠀ To register, simply head to brewgooder.com/gathering 📲 #BGG2020

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We found this next piece really intriguing - Glasgow based brewery Brewgooder has created a global initiative collaborating with hundreds of breweries to raise £250K for World Water Day in 2020. 

It’s awesome to hear that breweries are able to harness their global and passionate craft beer community to support sustainable growth. It’s a clever initiative that works two-fold; limited edition products are bought by loyal customers to boost the brewer’s profile internationally. 

At Mattr we’re all about partnerships and working for the longer-term, so it’s great to see breweries break down the barriers of competition and get together to help solve a monster challenge as an industry. We’re excited to see the content that comes out the back of such an initiative, and maybe to even see it as an annual event?

4. Acknowledging your environmental footprint - Hovis

With everyone jumping on the bandwagon, it’s becoming incredibly hard to see news online about a brand doing good for the environment and thinking it’s committing some form of greenwashing. And whilst admitting to your eco-vulnerability as a brand has never been more important, the key lesson to learn is how you communicate that properly. 

Just take EasyJet, who in spite of announcing their plans to offset their carbon emissions from its 329 aircraft by planting trees, still came into trouble by people claiming they could be doing more. There are many arguments to support both sides of the announcement - perhaps one could look at their execution and wording in their statement as a reason for the backlash, or even that because of the statement, it served no greater purpose than to cover up the real issue at hand.

A great example of a brand getting this kind of messaging right is Hovis and their new OOH eco advertising about their new electric delivery fleet. We laughed at the way Hovis made a jab at businesses claiming to be ‘100% green’ by claiming to be 100% yellow (how on brand for Mattr.. Luckily it’s not our pantone code). This matters because it’s authentic and effective - we love it when sarcasm hits the streets…

There is no definitive answer of what to do to be loved in today’s world, but the best you can do as a brand is to be honest and authentic when you don’t have everything in place. It will earn your brand more respect from your audience instead of creating tone-deaf content that doesn’t truly reflect what you stand for.

BBB tips: update your tone of voice, empower your customers and how to bridge gaps between your internal departments

Our latest instalment of Brand, Bitch & Brekkie saw an interesting mix of brands from the world of fintech, HR and charity sectors.

Intriguingly, everyone’s challenges seemed to overlap, no matter the stage of their brand’s journey. Here are a few things we chatted about...

Language is crucial for your brand

A couple of our guests had just come out of their re-brand process and one key piece of advice they gave was to review your guidelines every year so that you could update them as the company grew/developed.

One brand told us that before doing this, they’d kept using the same terms for their service users for years, even though personnel had changed and the brand had moved on to better the way they communicated with their partners, users and donors.

The key to success though wasn’t just updating the guidelines for marketing, but making sure they were being genuinely implemented properly across all teams.

How to empower your customers to be involved in your content

One of the biggest debates round the table was how to use showcase your customer’s stories in your content without it feeling like you’re taking advantage of them (especially when they’re about sensitive subject matters). So how do you reassure them they aren’t just a pawn in a marketing plan? 

We all agreed that much of that was down to trust...you need to put effort in to building a real relationship with your customer so that asking them to be part of your content is something they really want to do. You also shouldn’t shy away from checking in with the customer about the narrative and make them feel a part of the creative process.

And when dealing with sensitive subject matters, transparency is key. But it’s also nice creatively to push boundaries a bit, moving away from a “sob story” towards stories that let the customer feel empowered and proud of who they are.

Breaking down barriers between internal teams

All companies find their departments work in silos. None more so than the tech and marketing departments at high growth scale ups. The shame of course, is working together should breed better work, so one of the questions posed was how to strengthen the relationship between teams. 

One brand suggested turning empty walls in offices into physical roadmaps that work for both teams, to highlight the interdependency of everyone’s tasks, but also allow everyone to physically see how each role and action impacts the other.

For tech and marketing specifically, a really interesting suggestion was to use marketing resource to test the popularity of product features before they’re built - essentially getting feedback from your community and seeing if they like or dislike what you’re building. For the brand who tried this recently, their engagement rose significantly as their community became more invested in their product, and the tech team had full access to the feedback.

Creating channels bespoke for your audiences

Some brands really struggle to build consistency in their content on social. It’s even more complicated when you have multiple audiences who you’re trying to speak to.

One of our brands round the table confessed that they struggle with projecting their brand consistently with customers and new recruits through the same channels, but a solution from another guest was to simply set up separate channels (their example was an Instagram for their staff and another for their customers).

It allows them to create consistent customer content whilst showcasing visuals of their culture, stories and their values as a way to attract prospective employees that are the right cultural fit, all through separating the Insta- channels out. Their channel has worked so well that Instagram’s direct messaging function serves as a function for their HR team, who end up finding the majority of their recruits this way! 

Digital asset and project management tools

And before we go, there were plenty of tools thrown around that help make our brand marketer’s lives a little bit easier. For people who found that not enough people action what’s said in the brand guidelines - try Brand Folder as the ultimate resource for all your teams to access everything brand. 

Another tool suggested was Social HP, which allows you to write content on your colleagues behalf, if they’re bootstrapped for time or don’t really know how to flesh out an idea.

One of our marketers was a huge fan (nee, potential ambassador!) for Monday.com, the project management tool. You may have seen their witty print campaigns on TFL at the minute. It’s great for virtually keeping track on what’s going on, saving you chasing your colleagues for the thousandth time.

Learnt something new? Want to share your own thoughts on building brands that matter? Then why don’t you book a seat to our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable, at Riding House Cafe, Fitzrovia.

Email sunnii@mattr.media or give her a ring on 07772343952 for any questions

BBB tips: How to win stakeholder buy-in, the best ways to measure brand, how you can combat the challenges of global vs local marketing

We had another brilliant BBB this week with some amazing attendees. The below are a few tips from the really great conversations that were discussed over smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and OJ.

How to get stakeholders to buy-in to brand

When they can’t track impact or results of brand, stakeholders typically find it harder to justify parting with budget. And this is often the biggest challenge brand marketers face in the debate of performance vs brand. 

A really great recommendation on how to win buy-in from one of our marketers was to interrogate the ‘unknown’ sources in Google Analytics. If your stakeholders agree that it’s not unreasonable to assume leads driven from this source are from brand activity, you can start to build up a picture of the quantity and quality of leads/conversions created from these campaigns vs your performance ads.  

She admitted that although this trial is a couple of months old, however, it should help to justify spend for future brand-focused campaigns.

Be smart with how you measure sentiment

If surveys are part of how you’re collecting that data, one of the tips shared was to really interrogate the questions you were asking people. Often surveys are unreliable because what people say isn’t necessarily how they feel.

For example - most surveys people are asked “how do you feel about our product?” whereas a better way to get the truth out could be asking “how would you feel if our product didn’t exist?”  This measures sentiment as a justification for the effectiveness of brand building on business growth.

Simple things like this can trigger much richer insights that help brand marketers justify campaigns or projects that would otherwise be ignored.

Know the platforms that you’re on

An interesting insight was that many marketers at our roundtable supported moving away from having accounts on every social media platforms. There is plenty of pressure put on brand and social media managers to be “everywhere”, but if your most engaged audiences aren’t on Facebook, it’s a drag on resource to focus energies on it. 

In that same vein, if you’re going to focus on the platforms where your audiences are on, make sure you know how to use them best to your advantage. One brand told of how they had great community success on their Instagram channel by hiring an ex-influencer to become their social media manager, growing their community from 2K to 10K in a quarter. 

Another brand marketer pointed out that while choosing the right channel is the first step, the second is to pay attention to what is being created on each platform. They explained that for them, Youtube shouldn’t just be a space for brands to create their own content, but to co-create with relevant Youtubers with relevant audiences.

Bigger brands shouldn’t lose touch with hyper-local stories 

One topic we discussed was the challenge of global brands creating effective localised campaigns. Often there’s tension between global teams (who have the broader vision for where the brand needs to be) and the local teams (who have an ear to the ground and ultimately know more about what their local markets tastes are). So how can you fix this and ultimately create more effective work?

There’s no easy fix here but the key is global teams can’t dictate the nuances of particular pieces of content, hence the importance of local sign-off. We recently lived the benefits of this sign-off for localised content within our global campaign with Grant’s Whisky and by pulling together as a team, we created an inclusive, socially diverse campaign that went against the status quo of advertising in the whiskey world.

As one of our attendees put it, why should you trust middle-aged white guys to dictate the content narrative for a place they’ve never been to?

Learnt something new? Want to share your own thoughts on building brands that matter? Then why don’t you book a seat to our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable, at Riding House Cafe, Fitzrovia.

Email sunnii@mattr.media or give her a ring on 07772343952 for any q’s!

Marketing Alcohol – Stand up and Stand out (or give up!)

Picture this, you’re in the booze aisle at your local supermarket looking for a tipple… what do you see? A wall of generic bottles, confusing taste notes, copycat branding and often a race to the bottom on price. Yet with the rise of the ‘conscious consumer’ (people craving something more than the labels they buy) alcohol brands need to stand up and stand out if they are going to survive.

Just take a look at the beer market. Despite declining sales, one group is bucking the trend and growing rapidly - craft beer. Once a niche player, craft beer now makes up a whopping 24% of the total beer market in the US (Source: USA Today). Why? Because they offer consumers what they crave: depth, story and a purpose beyond the brand.

Need some inspiration? Look no further than BrewDog who skyrocketed to fame (and fortune) by ripping up the rule book when it comes to the alcohol sector. Brewdog’s branding, marketing, PR, staff culture and even core business model all reek of a brand that stands for more than their product.

(a snapshot of the weird and wonderful universe of BrewDog)

So how can you future proof your booze brand?

Step 1: Stand Up

Insights from the 2018 William Grant & Sons Market Report heralded the rise of a new consumer type ‘The Activ-ist’. These consumers are actively considering, caring and conscious about their purchases, how they consume them and their effect on the wider world. 

With alcohol in the past typically sold with snazzy campaigns and celebrity endorsements, now focus is shifting to the experience around the drink. To connect to consumers on a deeper level think beyond the liquid, what’s the environment, the atmosphere, the occasion, and the people you share it with.

You can see evidence of this shift with the rise of brand activations, experiential events, distillery tours and bar take-overs, all great ways to tap into the ‘Experience Economy’ but brands must think beyond one-off PR stunts to survive.

For example, take Grey Goose’s recent repositioning, starting from the ground up they have shifting their entire comms strategy away from the bottle to the experience around it, thus connecting with audiences on a much deeper level. Chief Marketing Officer at Grey Goose, Lee Applbaum said this: "'Good enough' has become a norm in the category, which has been dumbed down through price compression and clever, but often misleading marketing. Consumers are having a hard time connecting emotionally with Grey Goose. So, our energy with the brand is focussed on reconnecting with the consumers.”

(59 seconds of experiences, 1 second of product)

Step Two: Stand Out

With such heavy competition in the alcohol sector, how do you create cut through? Simple, switch the script, do the unexpected and stand out against the noise of your category.

When we began working with Grant’s Whisky our task was simple; punch above our weight and take on the Goliaths of the Whisky world by unlocking a new youth market.

Mattr’s first step was to conduct a series of market research sessions with this youth audience. We discovered whisky was often referred to as ‘the drink my father would choose’ and ‘not for me’. Another common theme we discovered in the sector was that of ‘personal progress’, a narrative pushed heavily by big players such as Johnnie Walker. As a result, our target audience negatively perceived Whisky as less sociable, a drink just for home or even alone.

We took our learnings from our market research and flipped the script … No more ‘drink of my father’ more ‘drink with my mates’ no more ‘personal progress’ - more ‘collective success’. The outcome? A TTL campaign that celebrated groups of friends starting an epic party. The result? A campaign which felt unexpected for its category yet tapped into what youth consumers craved, an experience beyond the product.

And one last thing… having a killer narrative is great but shouldn’t stop there; Alcohol brands have got to embrace a strong and consistent visual identity too. Your brand could have the greatest positioning in the world but if a consumer can’t remember your brand at the point of purchase you’ve failed - misattribution in advertising is killer. To avoid this in our Grant’s campaigns, we used consistent visual brand queues throughout (threes, triangles, colour pallets etc.) even a hand symbol synonymous with the bottle shape itself. The result was a campaign that felt unmistakably ‘Grant’s’ narratively AND visually.

(who wants to join the party?)

Mattr’s top 5 take-aways:

1.      Build brand depth, stand for something more than your product.

2.      Embrace the experience beyond the taste.

3.      Listen to your audience, what are their preconceptions of your category.

4.      Do the unexpected for your category.

5.      Be memorable keep it consistent and project a strong visual identity.

If you enjoyed reading this don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter (see below) for more articles and exclusive invites to events where we talk about how to make marketing that ‘Mattr’s’. If you work in the alcohol sector and this struck a chord with you drop us a line and lets meet for a coffee… or something a little harder ;)

Lets chat: Mrhine@mattr.media - Head of Creative (also likes a drink)

BBB tips: why brand needs to be part of your growth, how to data mine and maximise the value of your current content

Partnership is something we feel really strongly about at Mattr. And living that shouldn’t just impact how we work, it should be something we actively encourage.

That’s why we setup Brand, Bitch & Brekkie, an intimate, no-holds-barred knowledge swap between likeminded senior marketers to help each other navigate the challenges they’re going through.

The latest of these was a real eye opener. Here are some of the golden nuggets spoken about:

Brandbuilding should not be separate to growth marketing

Even if it doesn’t have the same KPIs as more direct performance ads, creative content creates ROI direct marketing simply can’t. Sales teams can use it as conversation starters, HR should see it as tools to onboard best in class talent, and performance teams can make it a means of leveraging data and insights. So factor these in when seeking stakeholder buy-in for your next brand campaign idea!

Never forget the customer

Many comms decisions are based on what people within the business THINK their customer wants. But the trick is really asking them what they actually want. Beyond SEO, Google Keywords and following social trends, it’s worthwhile hosting open office days and regular sessions with your customer service teams to help do this.

Sharing is caring

Utilising communication tools like Slack is a really great way to spark and share ideas when it comes to content planning. From inspiring to funny or interesting stories that people are saying about your brand on social, let your team know about them or otherwise nuggets will get lost in the ether.

Maximising value

Creating content (particularly video) can be expensive. So maximising value is really important. Being able to bank assets on set, re-hash old content with a new spin, or planning campaigns that have lifetime value and can scale, is the key to ensuring you get the most value from your budgets.

If you agree with the above and want to share experiences with like-minded colleagues, why don’t you book a seat to the next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable on 9th October at Riding House Cafe, Fitzrovia.

Email sunnii@mattr.media or give her a ring on 07772343952 for any q’s!

The 6 steps you need to follow to create a killer crowdfunding video

Like many start-ups raising investment through crowdfunding, fintech brand Chip knew their investment video was crucial. With only 2 weeks till the raise, they were worried the traditional ‘talking head’ interview with their founder they had produced just didn’t do their mission justice. They needed help…and fast!

Enter Mattr Media, who helped create one of the fastest ever campaigns to reach £1m (eventually raising over £3.5m+ with a 380% oversubscription rate) and a video shortlisted for Crowdcube’s Video and Campaign of the Year.

So, how did we do it? And how do we continue to achieve record-breaking results for our other crowdfunding clients? Well, the below are 6 key steps we take with all our crowdfunding projects…

RULE 1: DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR VIDEO

Unlike pitching to traditional investors, you aren’t going to necessarily meet crowdfunding investors face to face and they aren’t just looking for a 10x return.

Dan Hardy, Head of Business Development at Crowdcube, summed up perfectly why that means your video is so important: “video is the dominant media format online and since Crowdcube is primarily an online investment platform... (so) your pitch video is the best chance you have for investors to learn about you and your business…”

So doing one and doing it well is crucial.

RULE 2: TELL A STORY

So how do you do that? Well, don’t forget on crowdfunding platforms, most of the people watching your film are not as financially savvy as traditional investors. So whilst top-level metrics are important, it’s just as crucial to answer deeper introspective questions that your audience will connect with. Things like “why did we start this in the first place? What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? How can we show we’re a big deal (PR/Awards/Team etc.)? What does the future hold?”

It’s also important to not get lost in explaining the “features” of your product. As Hardy explains, “the objective here is to get people to invest in your business, not to buy your product. That's a big difference… You need to strike the right balance.”

Overall, keep the message simple and save the detail for additional supportive content.

RULE 3: BE DISTINCTIVE 

Depending on how much time you’ve spent defining your brand tone of voice, this will make life easier or more challenging for you. But if you haven’t the foggiest, this is where a creative partner like us can help.

In order to make this video feel distinctly “you”, it’s helpful to consider questions like-

• If we were a brand from a different sector, which would we choose to be?

• If we had 3 words to describe how we want people to feel after watching this, what should they be?

• If we had 3 words to describe our product, what would they be?

• If we imagined our brand as a celebrity, who would they be? And why?

It’s exactly these kinds of questions that led us to creating such a fun and quirky fundraiser for Chip.

RULE 4: PUT YOUR AUDIENCE FIRST

The rise in popularity of crowdfunding has been born out of a desire for consumers to feel more connected with the brands they buy from. And that’s why so many successful crowdfunding campaigns are community focused - just look at Monzo and their amazing £20m crowdfund, or Brewdog and their 2000% overfund to total £10m. 

Alex Latham, Chip’s CMO says “It’s really imperative that our staff and customers feel a part of our mission, particularly for crowdfunding. There was no better way of doing this than when Mattr recommended we champion these guys in our films. I would say a lot of our Crowdcube success has been because of this attitude. ”

You should not underestimate the value of people being your advocates, helping spread the word for you and hopefully investing too.

RULE 5: CREATE VALUE BEYOND THE HERO FILM

For some investors, watching your main film may not be enough to sway them to part with their money. So think about what content you can create to support their final decision. 

Supportive “product explainer” films are great for the nitty-gritty you haven’t spoken about in the main film and of course, there’s the pitch deck for the financials. However, if budget can stretch, we also encourage films about the staff.

It surprises us that not too many companies create update films on how the raise is going  after the campaign goes live, a useful tool to stay top of mind.

RULE 6: CHOOSE THE RIGHT PARTNER

Most video agencies have fixed “packages” (as do we) for crowdfunding campaigns and many of us have proven experience, so how do you choose the right partner?

A big component of that will be whether you believe your chosen agency is not just doing this to get paid, but ultimately because they believe in your business.

You can gage part of this from initial conversations and the value they provide. But whether they “walk the walk” is tough. That’s why at Mattr we developed two further offerings to the standard package, which aligns us even further to you in your quest for a successful raise:

1. A part fixed fee part success fee package 

2. A pure success fee package (i.e. absolutely no up front fee to do so)

Finally…

You’re at an exciting stage in your company’s journey, but we know your video will be a crucial piece in the success of your campaign. If you’re interested in learning more, do contact Chief Shmoozer Josh at josh@mattr.media

4 ways to completely screw up your video production (and how to avoid them)

We recently held a video content workshop which helped brands tackle how to put a watertight strategy together. One of the most interesting questions to come out of the session was what our biggest mistakes on set have been and what we learnt from them.

It’s funny because celebrating failure and showing vulnerability is something we believe all brands need to embrace in today’s world,  so this was a great reminder of how we can do the same. Below are just a few of our biggest learnings from some of the most challenging shoots we’ve worked on:

The one where the stakeholders weren’t involved in the whole process

Discover & share this Amy GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

We once worked on a project which, let’s just say, was a bit out there creatively. We got sign off from the dept in charge and rightly or wrongly, we assumed this was all that was needed. Trouble was, as we found out in post-production, there was an entire senior team who hadn’t been taken through the creative but whose opinion mattered. 

Luckily we managed to rectify the issues, however the project was delayed and it ended up costing unnecessary time and money.

What we learned: Always ensure your key stakeholders have been properly briefed and sign off on the concept. Best case scenario, you should organise a workshop to run through all the elements of what’s being proposed. At the very least, take time to consider whose opinion is going to matter and speak to them before you head into production.

The one where timings were thrown out the window

Red Bull Racing Formula 1 Team

We once worked on a very big campaign with a client who had a launch date 6 months from when the project commenced. We’d agreed to a broad timing plan, highlighting roles and responsibilities, yet with no immediate pressure to sign off on certain elements for the film we’d been briefed to produce, priorities changed and in all honesty, we didn’t feel it was fair to push back.

Critically, this changed the scope of the campaign, the budget and ultimate delivery. It also meant us mucking about our really talented freelance team who we’d hired to work the job. Everyone left feeling if we’d all have controlled things at the beginning, it would have made for a much more successful project.

What we learned: It is everyones responsibility to commit to a strict timing plan. Of course there can be some flexibility. However, being strict with delivery schedules and feedback rounds prevents unnecessarily uncomfortable conversations later down the line.

The one where the audience wasn’t central to the story 

Discover & share this truTV's At Home with Amy Sedaris GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

One of our first major brand gigs we ever did as Mattr, we were asked to create a film to celebrate a new product launch. The team in charge gave us a creative brief, we put together a beautiful film about craft with a classical track in the background, but it was only after the film was created that we were told the content wasn’t at all right for the audience we were speaking to...”these aren’t artists we’re talking to guys, these are teenage boy racers”. A bodge job and drum and bass track later, we actually ended up creating one of the best performing campaigns of the year BUT this was very very lucky and it could have gone horribly wrong.

What we learned: ALWAYS interrogate a brief. Even if it has been written up for you, don’t just rely on what you’re being told...get to the bottom of who you’re meant to be creating this film for and only then come up with your ideas.

The one where the platforms weren’t considered 

Discover & share this Betty White GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

We often work with clients who want to create multi-platform campaigns. The trouble is unless you’re told specifically about the platforms you’re creating the content for, it’s not going to work as hard as it could do for you.

We learnt this the hard way when a client decided to repurpose a campaign on multiple platforms beyond the scope of the brief. Low and behold the content didn’t perform as well here as on the channels we had planned for, yet the client believed this indicated the channel’s weren’t appropriate to work on again, not that the content that lived on it wasn’t right.

What we learned: Research every single platform you can see your content sitting on and create ideas bespoke for that platform. And try to create general guidelines to stick to, that way your money will work harder.

Ahhh, that felt good. It’s nice to share bad experiences and turn them into positive lessons…

If you agree and want to do the same with likeminded people, you should check out BRAND, BITCH & BREKKIE. Our regular therapy session for brand marketers who wish to share their wins and losses on the road to building brands that matter.

Until next time!

Build a Brand Movement Round Up: Alzheimer’s Society, LoveCrafts & Method + Ecover

The #mattrmovement came back with a bang this week and wow was it an amazing night!

We loved the energy and insights from our amazing speakers Sylvia, Nigel and Sara and loved the questions from the audience...thank you everyone once again!

Here are just a few golden nuggets we took away from our lovely speakers, and if you want to see the full talks, look out for the videos we’ll be posting soon...

Sylvia Lowe, Alzheimer’s Society: Look beyond your brand

“No business is an island, everyone needs to help one another” explained Sylvia

With people developing dementia every three minutes, Alzheimer’s Society are constantly asking themselves... is the key to growing donations creating awareness about Dementia or creating awareness about their brand? The conclusion: if they can lead with the former, the latter will follow.

Sylvia showcased how effective this approach is using the grassroots #askusanything campaign which the charity launched during Dementia Action Week. The campaign focused on educating the masses about the condition and empowering those who suffered with Dementia to speak about what everyday life is like. This was capped off with a great film that totally humanised the issue without ‘sadvertising’.

The results? 28,000 more dementia friends (now totalling 2.8 million!) volunteering, added awareness through a series on Channel 4 ‘The Restaurant that Makes Mistakes’, and great media coverage to position the society as global pioneers. Not bad for a campaign that didn’t put the brand front and centre of its comms...

Takeaway: Turn your thought leadership into action leadership

Nigel Whiteoak, LoveCrafts: Data and creative are a match made in heaven

Nigel confessed “I’m a data geek”

Nigel loves his data, and he isn’t afraid to show it. In fact, it was this data that led to the success of their biggest in-house brand label: Paintbox. Online conversations suggested there was an untapped market for a broad range of colourful and affordable yarn so they seized the opportunity.

Using feedback from staff, customers and influencers in the crafting community, they perfected their product and brand, transforming LoveCrafts from a platform to a popular brand in its own right.

Earlier this year, Paintbox Yarns launched in the US with an advertising campaign created off the back of their learnings and data. The result was a colourful and playful film which tapped into influencers and the wider knitting community. This achieved a brand lift across social 5x over the average (I wonder who was the clever agency behind that ;))!

Takeaway: Get your customers involved in the curation of your brand

Sara Mendez Bermudez, Ecover & Method Cleaning: Your brand is only as good as the people behind it

“Brands don’t die, it’s the passion of the marketers behind it”, joked Sara

Launched in the 1970’s, Ecover was considered a seriously rebellious company in the cleaning sector. Fast forward 4 decades, the modern consumer is now looking for a shift in narrative - from one that looked within (Ecover is for the world of cleaning) to one that looked out (Ecover can help clean the world).

Their mission became clear: to lead a clean world revolution. This mission would guide them through everything, from who they work with, to how they present their products. Thanks to this communication strategy, the company saw not just a brand uplift but their sales and market share boomed too.

There were many things to take away from Sara’s talk, but her enthusiasm for embracing the ‘inner rebel’ in people and making them feel part of a movement rather than just selling a product was something we particularly loved.

Takeaway: Get comfortable being uncomfotable

To summarise… never settle

An extremely important pattern throughout all of our speakers’ talks was the importance of not fearing failure, and instead dedicating time to look at what can be improved.

Sara highlighted in her presentation that “progress and not perfection” is what to strive for when looking at how to build a true movement. At LoveCrafts, Nigel spoke about not fighting the feedback, instead, learn from it. And Sylvia explained how a brand has the power to disrupt the status quo of an entire sector, you don’t always have to settle.

It isn’t easy to build a movement. But if you put the audience first, think about your impact beyond your product and communicate yourself in a way that feels truly valuable, you’re on the right path.

Josh Fineman, Mattr Media Co-Founder rounding up the night

And before we go...  

If you enjoyed coming to our event, or even reading our tips from the eve, you may wanna check out our next content workshop on July 10th. For more info or to book your seat book click HERE...but hurry seats are limited and already selling!