Meet the Expert
Jeff Odiorne
President, Revival House
- Won multiple accolades from The One Show, CA, D&AD, and Cannes.
- Wrote the taglines “If it’s in the game, it’s in the game” for EA Sports and "All things sporting good" for Sports Authority.
- His agency was written about as one of the 10 greatest success stories of overseas expansion in a book published by The US Chamber of Commerce.
- Featured in Wired Magazine and The Wall Street Journal (even got his face illustrated); TV appearances on Business Unusual and The Greta Van Sustren Show.
- Clients have included: Nissan, Mercedes, GM, Dell, Burger King, Round Table Pizza, Labatt's, Stroh's, Budweiser, Ketel One Vodka, Hershey, Campbell's Soup, Xerox, Kodak, Mirage Hotel/casino, Treasure Island Hotel/casino, Ally Bank, Etrade, Olive Garden Restaurants, Febreze, and P&G.
Meeting Packages from $600
Your Meeting Package Includes:
- All 7 Best Practices
- Pre-Meeting Discovery Process
- One-on-One Call with Expert
- Meeting Summary Report
- Post-Meeting Engagement
Disruptive Creativity - How to Create Value and Differentiate Your Brand
President, Revival House
Common Problems
- Bringing in creatives to "save something" means you've probably started way too late. . . but things can be saved.
- The best time to be brought in is early enough so that creativity can be monetized; that is, the intersection of art and commerce. Knowing the business problem first is key to developing a strategy that intersects art and commerce. The object is to develop a high level creative platform that creative directors, copy writers, art directors and designers, as well as fulfillment and production directors, can work off of.
The ideal place to insert creative is when you don't think you're ready. That's the time to translate your best strategy into words that creatives can understand. Though starting in savior mode isn't ideal, it is not impossible.Here's a great example of how disruptive creativity helped turn a company around. Take a look at Kmart's Ship My Pants campaign.
- A lot of creatives forget about making money; they just love the art.
- Creative for creative's sake doesn't get anybody anywhere. There are two sides to this problem:
- There are a bunch of people in the creative side of the business who don't have the experience to intersect art and commerce. They're very creative and know the technology but they don't know how to create messages that resonate to the benefit of the client or product.
- Then there's the problem of big agencies owned by holding companies that rely on the creative department to help out their bottom lines. What you get are great ideas turned over to a bunch of people who don't yet have the experience or expertise to meld strategy with art and commerce.
- Clients make big mistakes when – at the last minute – they pull back on budget or get cold feet about the strategy they've chosen.
- If clients bring in 10 other decision makers at the last minute, the creative content will be watered down and you won't get the result you want. The time for collaboration is upfront, not at the end. Don't get cold feet about the budget or the strategy just before launch. This can happen when there's no clear decision-maker who owns the project and the strategy. If a projects gets passed from person to person, it'll never get off the ground. Someone has to own it and be committed to it.
- Agencies make big mistakes when they spend the client's money in ways that benefit the agencies more than the clients.
- Nine times out of 10, going with the big name firm is the wrong thing to do. There's a lot of talent out there but the typical agency model is living off the legacy. Big platform thinkers and good storytellers have been displaced by an army of people who can sit at a computer and bang stuff out. We'll never go back to the days of the big bad agency where creatives were treated like the pedantic babies that they were. What we need to go back to is quality conceptual storytelling.
Agencies are usually on retainer and they don't want to lose money by being really honest with their clients. In order to service their overhead, agencies may make decisions that benefit them over their clients' interests. For example, an agency's social media department isn't busy enough so the agency directs $5 million of the client's budget to social media even though the right tactic for this client might be the experiential market.
Here's another example: Sometimes when you start working on a product or service you know it just won't sell. That's when you should be courageous and honest enough to challenge the client: What if you changed it to this? What if you changed it to that? Have you considered this? Have you considered that? - Overreliance on old models such as 30- and 60-second TV and radio ads ignores new technology and the need for good storytelling.
- We will never go back to elegant, 90-second commercial Super Bowl spots because platforms are different. So everybody is focusing on multi-screen technology but they have no idea how to tell an elegant, interesting, cohesive and persuasive story using the new technologies.
- Clients hold on to campaigns too long if they fully don't understand the message and the metrics for its success.
- For example, the baby for E*TRADE went on way too long. The baby should have gone away a couple of years ago. There are other problems when a client gives up on something too soon. There is no template, however. This assessment requires a deep understanding of the campaign and applied metrics to see if the campaign is working. Last, the client and the creative must determine the client's appetite to continue.
Disruptive Creativity - How to Create Value and Differentiate Your Brand:
Common Problems
Expert Topic