I went to Greece recently with a friend from our agency Magda Kozińska, and the last thing we had on our minds was content marketing. But since we couldn’t get away from our minds completely, we also couldn’t get away from our job. That’s the feature characteristic of all ‘creative’ jobs – we are working even when it seems we aren’t. As we were meandering lazily through the streets of Nafplio, a charming town in the Peloponnese, looking for fredo espresso (a brilliant invention – espresso with ice cubes – brings you back to your feet instantly) we suddenly said both at the same time: that’s so cool!
On the border of the Old Town, at the bottom of a steep mountain which holds the ruins of a Venetian fortress on the very top, there hides a small cafe with a few tables in the street. About three meters further there begin the stairs to the top of the mountain – exactly 999 steps… The owner of the cafe placed a blackboard near the stairs with a neat funny drawing of people climbing the stairs with more and more effort, eventually on all fours, and then going back down completely exhausted, where coffee is already waiting for them along with the inscription: You are a hero, you made it!
It’s impossible not to smile at it, even when your legs are still shaking. The advertisement isn’t pushy, doesn’t have flashy neons, it’s not ‘cheap’ – it’s elegant and you know immediately that the cafe must have great staff and atmosphere. This is an example of a perfect use of the location, reference to those nasty stairs and a kind way of noticing that people are huffing and puffing while climbing up there – the idea is brilliant and the execution must have taken less than five minutes.
We used a similar style when preparing Christmas gifts for our clients and associates last year (and look at this and this). The brainstorming was long, and finally Magda Kozińska came up with the idea of Mr. Ginger. It was a man-shaped piece of ginger wrapped up in an elegant little box with a recommendation of using Mr. Ginger for a warming cup of tea or an afterwork cocktail. We ordered boxes full of ginger at a local greengrocer’s to choose the most human-looking pieces. The recipes were printed on cards designed by our creative director Marcin Rutkowski – and thus our ginger figurines headed out to our clients and associates.
Our warming gifts were warmly welcomed 🙂
Simple as that!
It's not a coincidence many customers nowadays prefer to get simple messages – we're on the hop and attacked with incentives from every side, there are a million ideas every minute going through our heads, plus a hundred problems to solve. As a result, we appreciate content that is pure in form, economical and just… simple. But in order to produce content of this kind, you need to do a lot of creative work first! It's the same with advertising slogans – it's not difficult to describe a product in 30 words, but to do so shrewdly is no longer that easy, is it?
A message hidden in one sentence, a simple graphic or a short handout can be more powerful than a 100-sentences long description. A well-thought-out black-and-white image printed on regular paper can be better than an animation produced on high-end equipment by the sweat of one's brow. Naturally, this won't work every time and for every environment, and I'm not trying to make you turn your back at modern technologies, which I personally love and can't imagine living without them. But I do mean that while we're rushing for more and more advanced technologies, we shouldn't forget that sometimes the simplest idea works miracles.
Kategorie: power of contentic, B2C