Creative thinking isn’t only about great storytelling and fantastically well-directed content that’s crafted with the help of a generous budget.
Sometimes just knowing your audience and how and where your audience will be viewing your video can lead to the most creative and effective campaign. Canadian Agency ‘Rethink’ have proved this with their commercial for Weed B Gon:
During normal YouTube pre-roll adverts, viewers are offered the chance to SKIP AD in 5,4,3,2,1 seconds – which can feel like a lifetime. The nano second arrives where you can click the SKIP AD box and BOOM! your commercial is cut short and your valuable advertising opportunity is over.
Rethink, however, have turned the SKIP AD feature into a fun function & part of the story. As Prickly, the annoyingly loud and obnoxious muppet-like weed, shouts on the screen, viewers are offered a button to KILL PRICKLY. Once you click on this feature, Prickly is sprayed with Weed B Gon and the brand has done its job and the advert is over. Genius.
The agency have also aired the advert on TV cleverly timing the scheduling of the commercial so that Prickly can tell you he’s spreading all over the channels so that when you turn over… there he is!
The lesson? Think about the bigger picture: great creative commercials don’t end when the director shouts ‘cut’.
