17 Jan 2022
The Age of Collaborative Creativity
At Good Relations we run the ‘Challenger Sessions‘, a programme of events designed to champion challenger brand thinking and creativity in the earned space.
The following article explores discussions from one of our latest events: “Influencer and Partnership Marketing: The Age of Collaborative Creativity” led by our Social & Content Director, Tom Sneddon.
Featuring guest speakers Anton Reyniers from Google and content creator Max Klymenko, we challenged how ‘Collaborative Creativity’ has opened up a new playing field to reach audiences and how brands can find their place in the new creative landscape.
For a copy of this recording or to join our events guestlist, please get in touch.
As we charge into 2022, the mandate for marketers to build creative relevance with audiences has never been more urgent or challenging.
Over the last few decades the path to relevance for brands has been through integrations with big cultural moments. You know the drill; attach to big media tentpole events that mostly happen in linear formats and drive a ton of conversation around both physical and digital ‘water coolers’. But that playbook is running out of juice. Audiences for those tentpole moments are falling off a cliff. Look no further than last year’s Oscars where 10.4m people tuned in live, a 56% decline from the previous year.
It would be all too easy to chalk up these steep declines to pandemic-induced languishing, but if marketers are hoping for audiences to return in droves as part of a reopening rebound, they will surely be disappointed. Audiences haven’t disappeared, they have migrated. They are now everywhere, online, all the time.
Publishers and platforms, both familiar and emerging, are seeing record jumps in audiences. TikTok has 13m monthly active users in the UK alone, Snap has 20m. Twitch has 2m daily users. YouTube dominates with 35m. And let’s not forget about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest… the list goes on.
This is a moment of creative rebirth. It has opened up a new playing field for brands to reach audiences by identifying and integrating with the culturally cool IP that is born from digital channels.
Regardless of the destination, these audiences share one commonality: they are finding new ways to engage with the things they are passionate about, and the possibilities are both endless and always on.
This is a moment of creative rebirth. It has opened up a new playing field for brands to reach audiences by identifying and integrating with the culturally cool IP that is born from digital channels. Instead of simply buying ads in big moments, creativity in media now is about collaboration. Collaboration with the publishers, platforms, production companies and people who are driving culture forward online to co-create ideas that are authentic to their distribution platform. These choices stem from a new rubric of partner considerations, defined by where to find your people.
Fashion brands, no strangers to collaboration, are leading the way. Burberry is seemingly everywhere at once, launching inventive collaborations and playing with social commerce, YouTube performances and limited drops with its Colors partnership.
Technology brands that inherently understand network effects and the power of many-to-many communication are also making headway. Peloton is increasingly integrating its community into its content and marketing efforts as well as collaborating with musicians like Beyonce and Timbaland and Swizz Beats to build greater awareness for the brand and product.
In this new, networked culture, collaborative creativity paired with contextual awareness is what resonates. It’s internet-first content that is tailor-made for digital consumption. Cut-downs and adaptations no longer suffice. The old adage that ‘content is king’ still holds true—but with a twist. In this new, networked culture, collaborative creativity paired with contextual awareness is what resonates. Audiences not only love it but will increasingly expect nothing less.
