Part I, The Thinking · Chapter 5

The Creative and the Engine

How to plan a promotional campaign that keeps its promise

A chocolate bar that read the internet

In late May 2016, Snickers in Australia started reading the internet. An algorithm built by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne for Mars went through around fourteen thousand social posts a day, looking for anger with a lexicon of some three thousand words that was meant to understand slang and sarcasm. The angrier the internet got, the cheaper a Snickers became at 7-Eleven. The price changed more than a hundred and forty times a day, and on the worst days it fell as far as 82 per cent below the normal shelf price. You went to the Snickers website, pressed a button, got a barcode on your phone and showed it at any of 7-Eleven’s stores. No app, no voucher to print. The campaign ran until the end of June, and it was called the Hungerithm.

It is worth pausing on what kind of thing that was, because it does not fit neatly into either of the two rooms most promotions are built in. It was not a creative idea that somebody then attached a mechanic to. It was not a mechanic that somebody then dressed in a campaign. The price engine was the advertisement. The brand line, you are not you when you are hungry, had been running for years; here it became a piece of software that turned the national mood into a shelf price, live, and the only way to see the idea was to watch the engine work.

The agency’s own case study reports that Snickers sales rose 67 per cent and Snickers sales at 7-Eleven grew a little over 19 per cent. It does not say who measured either figure, so we give them as the agency gives them and lean on them no harder than that. What nobody disputes is that it was talked about, which is the job it was built for: a Headliner, in the language of chapter 2, whose engine was the joke.

Most promotions are not built like that. Most are built by two sets of people who rarely sit in the same meeting, and this chapter is about what happens in the gap between them.

Two layers, two rooms: the creative idea and the mechanic

Every promotion has two layers. The creative layer is everything the shopper sees and remembers: the idea, the line, the look, the shelf impact, the reason it feels like this brand and nobody else. The engine layer is everything that makes the promise true: the offer design, the odds, the caps, the gates, the claim form, the validation, the fraud checks, the payment, the phone call to the winner. The creative layer is the part that wins awards. The engine layer is the part that decides whether the shopper who believed the creative is glad they did.

In most organisations the two layers are briefed separately. The creative agency gets the brand brief and the campaign idea; the promotions team, or the platform, or somebody in operations, gets a mechanic and a budget and is asked to make it work. The first time the two meet is often a work-in-progress meeting a few weeks out, where somebody discovers that the hero line promises something the terms do not, or that the claim process needs a field the creative never mentioned, or that the prize everyone loves cannot be fulfilled in the timeframe on the poster.

We have sat on both sides of that meeting for a long time, and we have come to a simple position. The best promotions we know were not great creative with a sensible mechanic attached. They were a great mechanic, designed first and designed well, and then brought to life by creative that understood exactly what the mechanic was doing. The free flights in chapter 4 were a creative idea that only existed because the engine made it priceable. The Hungerithm was an engine that only existed because the creative needed it. In both, you cannot find the seam.

Our dancing bottle in chapter 1 is the other kind. The creative layer was beautiful and the engine was an afterthought: there was nothing to win, nothing to make the download worth it, and no reason for anyone at a bottle shop on a Friday to do the work. A creative layer cannot carry an engine that is not there, and if the economics do not work, no artwork will save them.

When the engine fails in public

The engine is mostly invisible when it works, which is why it tends to be the last thing designed and the first thing cut. It becomes very visible when it fails, and it almost always fails at the moment the shopper is holding the promise in their hand.

In 1990 Coca-Cola built cans that sprang open to reveal cash inside. To make the winning cans feel like real ones, they were weighted with water. Some of the mechanisms failed, at least one person drank the water, and what had been the company’s flagship promotion that year was pulled within weeks. The idea was magic. The failure was in the single moment the shopper actually touched it.

In 2009 KFC put a coupon for a free grilled chicken meal online, and Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show. Millions of coupons were downloaded, stores were overwhelmed, franchisees ran out of chicken, and KFC stopped honouring its own coupon partway through, handing out rain checks and an apology instead. The creative and the media had worked beyond anyone’s plan. The engine had no cap, no stock model and no way of slowing down, and so the promotion was killed by its own success.

And chapter 3 has already met the darkest one: McDonald’s Monopoly in the United States, where the person trusted with the winning pieces was quietly selling them for twelve years. Shoppers never noticed, because the creative layer kept working perfectly. Nobody can feel the difference between long odds and none.

Each of those failures is a lever from chapter 6 that the engine was supposed to hold. The MagiCan was Belief and Friction at the point of contact. KFC was Liability, an open promise with nothing between it and the queue. Monopoly was Belief at its most basic: whether the prize could be won at all. The engine is where the faders are physically held in place. When it slips, they move on their own.

How to write a promotion headline: the message hierarchy

Between the creative and the engine sits a thin layer that both sides tend to think the other owns, which is the words. You can have the right mechanic, the right odds and a sound budget, and still lose the shopper because they cannot tell what they would get in the three seconds they give you.

In the aisle the shopper reads a promotion in a fairly fixed order, and it is not the order the creative is usually laid out in. First, a trigger word: win, instant, free, guaranteed. Then the prize: what do I get? Then the quantity, because one prize and a thousand prizes are completely different offers. Then the odds or the value. Then the cost of taking part: just scan, or buy three? After that they have either committed or moved on, and the campaign narrative, the brand story and the legals have not been read by anyone deciding anything.

Our own working version is shorter, and we put it on every asset we brief: the reward, the action and the deadline, in that order. What do I get, what do I do, by when. A good headline answers the first of those in two or three words. Win $10 instantly is a promotion. Participate in our exciting summer promotion for a chance to experience paradise is a paragraph, and each of its words is working against it: participate sounds like effort, chance sounds like unlikely, and experience sounds like nobody is sure what the prize is.

Getting the hierarchy right pays for itself in places nobody budgets for. Designers know what to make big. Shoppers will tolerate more friction when the value is plain. The category manager sees an offer that will sit cleanly in a catalogue. And legal review goes faster, because an offer that is clear and prominent is most of the way to being compliant. The hierarchy is not a style preference. It is where the creative layer agrees, out loud, to tell the truth about the engine.

After the till

Here is the part of a promotion almost no creative brief mentions: what happens to the shopper after they have bought. For a prize draw it is a form and then, for nearly everyone, silence. For a cashback or a gift with purchase it is a claim: a receipt photographed, a serial number found, a form filled in, a wait, a payment. That is a second shopper experience, often weeks long, and it is where the brand either keeps its promise or quietly breaks it.

Most of what we know about this we know from running it. A claim fails for dull reasons: the receipt photo is too dark, the model number is in the wrong place, the form asks for something the shopper does not have to hand. Every one of those is a person who did what the poster asked and still did not get what it promised, and none of them shows up in the creative’s awards entry. The engine’s job is to make the necessary checks feel proportionate, to tell people clearly what went wrong and give them a way back, and to pay quickly, because nothing turns a happy claimant into a complaint faster than a long wait for money they have already been promised.

It is also where the long promises live. Some gift-with-purchase programs never really close: the offer sits on the shelf for years, and every week a few more receipts arrive to be read, serial numbers checked and gifts sent. The creative made people want the gift. The engine is the reason an offer can stay open that long without anyone having to think about it, and it is the reason a client can say yes to a promise with no end date.

[STORY NEEDED: why we built our own engine]

This is the place for the story of Trevor itself: what we saw going wrong, or not well enough, when the engine sat with a third party, and what made us decide to build our own platform rather than keep briefing someone else’s. Needed from Mark: the moment or the campaign that tipped it, roughly when, and one thing Trevor now does that we could not do before. No third party named (ruling R7). One or two paragraphs is enough; it is the book’s most honest explanation of why the agency and the platform are the same business. Client stories only from public facts, or with the client’s written permission; no client data (ruling R15).

Same room, same day

So the rule we work to is unglamorous. The creative and the engine are decided in the same room, on the same day, by people who can both read a terms and conditions document and a mood board. The job comes first, as chapter 2 asks. Then the levers, as chapter 6 sets out. Then the mechanic that holds them in place. And then the creative, whose task is not to decorate the mechanic but to make the shopper understand it in three seconds and want it in four.

When that happens, the seam disappears, and you get promotions where you cannot tell where the idea ends and the machinery begins. A phone plan that comes with a flight on the sister airline. A chocolate bar that gets cheaper when the internet gets angry. Those are not creative ideas with good operations behind them. They are the same idea, built once, by people who understood that the engine is where the promise is kept.

The next chapter takes the five levers that engine has to hold, one at a time, starting with a game that improved four of them and then did not come back.