Something that stood out during our research for the influencer feature in the latest edition of NZ Marketing was the willingness of brands to relinquish creative control to the content creators they work with.
One of the most extreme examples of this would be that of Lincoln Automobiles, which commissioned a collection of creatives to develop a series of videos based on their interpretation of the brand’s (suitably vague) positioning, ‘Hello Again’.
The only mandatory from Lincoln was that the videos would be housed on its Vimeo page and not bring the brand into disrepute. And speaking to several figures in the industry it became apparent that variations of this bold approach were becoming more common, particularly in instances when brands were collaborating with new-age celebrities who often owed their fame to grainy clips produced entirely in their bedrooms.
Brands seem comfortable taking a backseat and letting content creators do what they do best, as long as there’s the odd spot of brand affiliation or references to a service.
“We create the paddock for them to play in, but the way they do that is completely up to them,” said Kiwibank’s head of marketing comms and content Regan Savage when talking about partnering with YouTube star Jamie Curry for the KB Series.
And taking inspiration from the willingness of brands to risk their reputations in this way, the team at NZ Marketing decided to hand the creative reins over for this issue and, as part of the production process, we asked five organisations featured in the story—BurgerFuel, Google, Instagram, Invivo/The Goat Farm and Kiwibank/Assignment Group—to create covers for the magazine, with the only instruction being that it had to feature the phrase ‘How to win friends and influence people’.
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- BurgerFuel
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- Invivo/The Goat Farm
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- Kiwibank/Assignment Group
Each of the brands obliged and developed their own unique take on the theme, so we’ve done a split print run of five different covers for this issue. If you collect them all, let us know. We’ll get Graham Norton to send you a bottle of Invivo*.
- Read more on influencers in the latest edition of NZ Marketing or head over to tonight’s StopPress Presents event to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
*This may not actually happen.
