Theright.fit breakfast: talking collaboration, creativity & cut-through.

With Australia’s small population and limited geographically profitable markets, there’s an upside to putting up significant barriers to the types of camaraderie that lead to collaboration. But the time is ripe to reinvent our industry culture, in order to improve what our agencies can offer.

Nathan Burman brought forth a wonderful case study for collaboration in Australia from his team at Twitter. They were given the task of promoting the video sharing and streaming capabilities of their platform.

The challenge was to find a way to partner up with content producers and organisations in a way that made it cost effective for them to produce great content

They tracked down surfer/fox cameraman Mitch Oates, who was already regularly streaming his morning surfs on their platform Periscope. Combining with Telstra and Tourism & Events Queensland, they flew Mitch to the Great Barrier Reef. There he was given a mask that allowed him to talk underwater while streaming, sharing some of the most exciting parts of the reef in real time.

The simple truth is, a lot of what we do as advertising creatives falls into the category of convergent thinking — we take a client brief, and find a solution that fits within their parameters. But it never hurts to come at things the other way around. By starting from a single point and working outwards, the possibility for creativity increases exponentially.

Click here for a more in-depth look at divergent thinking, why it’s useful and how to do it.

This is part of the brilliance of influencers. They can take a brand or product and make it distinctly their own, without compromising the brand authenticity or their own image. Although, as resident expert Andi Lew pointed out, influencing should be a by-product of something the ‘influencer’ already does for it to work.

Think of influencer as an effect rather than a title.

Everyone at theright.fit breakfast seemed to agree that companies are beginning to wise up to this shift in who has and who owns influence. Most notably, that below the line media influencers and figures are subsuming much of the third-party credibility traditionally held by above the line media.

This is based on the principles of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and is key to audience cut-through in digital spaces. But these sorts of habits are also incredibly important to the way your brand occupies consumer mind-share. With consistent branding, the way people perceive products, brands and content is given a solid, unmoving foundation based on what you’ve chosen to put out into the world.

Finally, Nathan couldn’t stress enough the importance of brand tracking research, post-campaign, in order to prove that value is being delivered. This means conversion tracking, follow-up cognitive recall surveys, perceptual mapping, and optimising the way you create and distribute based on the results, to make sure what you’re doing has an effect.

None of this is news to our industry. There’s no ground-breaking revelations or hacks to get ahead in any media space. But the discussion around what makes great work and how we can do better is an important one to have, and theright.fit picked a great mix of personalities to get everyone thinking about what’s next for our industry.