We love advertising – in all its diverse forms, above and below the line, old and new media. We continue to be successful with it and we don’t intend to stop. But advertising is now only one part of what our agency does.

Increasingly our work is taking us beyond the old confines of concept, copy and layout. Today we are just as likely to respond to a brief by developing technology or by finding a smart way to improve disease management.

And instead of the usual opportunities to see we’re creating opportunities to experience the message. It’s the philosophy of selling-by-doing as opposed to selling-by-telling.

It’s not like conventional marketing...

... it’s interventional marketingThe ideas we’re talking about are different in spirit to anything you’d normally expect to find on a media plan. Our aim is to involve people directly – treating them as active participants not as passive members of an audience. We want to make things happen close to the point of influence, using the budget shrewdly by changing minds and behaviour in as targeted a way as possible.

Conventional marketing operates in many guises, but in our view – whether it’s posters or PR – if someone’s paying to put a message out, it all counts as advertising. Interventional marketing acts in other ways. And because it requires us to make things rather

than ads, we’ve given this kind of work its own name...

What we’ve discovered goes deeper than a label though. Our thingvertising work is shaping the way we think

about everything we do as an agency.

Advertising and thingvertising work differently Advertising and thingvertising can be used for the same jobs – brand awareness, persuasion, behaviour change – but they work in quite different ways.

Thingvertising creates participation To thingvertise is to turn marketing words into real-world deeds. The options are endless – it might be a tool, a game, an event, anything – but the intention is always to actively involve the audience in what the brand stands for.

Advertising is all about projectionTo advertise is to create a message and put it where the audience can see it. The channels of communication may vary, but the intention is always to inform or entertain people in the expectation they’ll respond.

Each is strong in different ways. Advertising is brilliant at reaching a large audience, creating a sense of presence, sustaining momentum and fostering loyalty. There’s really nothing like it for building brands. Thingvertising can bring an advertising message to life. Its forte is the ability to convert intentions into behaviour.

Together advertising and thingvertising cover the whole marketing journey from awareness to intention and from intention to action. They were born to work as a team, each one providing inspiration for the other.

Advertising and thingvertising belong together

It’s indirect thingvertising if it stimulates an audience’s intention to respond.

It’s direct thingvertising if it creates the response itself.

There are two kinds of thingvertisingDepending on the expected outcome, we describe thingvertising as being either indirect or direct.

Indirect thingvertisingRather like advertising, indirect thingvertising exists to put a message into the minds of the audience. But it can do so with more resonance, because when people take part in an activity they become personally engaged in a way they can never be when passively viewing an ad.

Here’s an example from our work in healthcare marketing...Asthma treatment needs to go deep into the lungs to do its job. That can’t happen unless people use their inhaler devices correctly. But most of us fail at this, because with current inhalers there are just too many ways to get it wrong. Teva Respiratory believes in intuitive design; it has launched an inhaler that people can just pick up and use with barely any need for instruction. This device has the potential to improve asthma control and cut hospitalisations. But Teva’s first task is to get doctors to believe the problem exists. Inhaler misuse is not something many GPs recognise and it’s rarely their prime suspect when asthma treatment fails. woolley pau gyro devised a thingvertising solution called ‘Inhaled or Failed?’ We filmed people using popular inhalers in lots of different ways – with good technique and bad. Then we created a digital game format in which doctors could score points by saying who ‘inhaled’ and who ‘failed’. By making lots of errors of their own, doctors taking the challenge soon discover the truth about inhaler technique. And an abstract argument, about something doctors never see, is suddenly real and irrefutable. Indirect thingvertising can do that.

Direct thingvertisingThe direct form of thingvertising takes persuasion to the next level: it finds an inventive solution, one that – as the name suggests – directly addresses the business need or public health challenge. It doesn’t wait for the audience to act in response to a message. Direct thingvertising creates the action.

Here’s an example from public health...How do you get kids to wash their hands more often?You could put out persuasive messages about the dangers of germs – with posters in schools, leaflets for parents, that kind of thing. Or, as one South African company did, you could put small toys inside transparent bars of soap. Suddenly, children are washing their hands as diligently as surgeons. With one insightful intervention the ‘Hope Soap’ campaign cut the local infection rate by 70%. Direct thingvertising can do that.

Agency: Y&R SOUTH AFRICA http://vimeo.com/70407646

Thingvertising inspires advertising

Agency: DDB Stockholmhttp://bit.do/funtheory

Volkswagen has a campaign called The Fun Theory. It’s all about changing behaviour for the better by making things fun to do. As part of the campaign they converted the steps of a Stockholm subway station into live piano keys.

The result: everybody who saw it wanted to take the healthy option and nobody wanted to take the escalator. This is a perfect example of a thingvertising idea. Yet only a few hundred people in Sweden were directly involved. However, millions of people came to know about it because they saw the video or visited the website or watched the news reports. And so a little local idea became the raw material for a conventional mass media campaign that said great things about the company and its attitude to life. Thingvertising can do that too.

Thingvertising has changed the way we think Thingvertising could be viewed as simply a new name for tactical ideas that already exist under other headings like experiential or gamification.

But that’s missing the point...

...because of thingvertising we’ve reshaped our creative process.

We’ve learned that the search for a thingvertising idea takes us closer to the heart of a client’s business problem and forces us to answer a different question. Instead of wondering what we need to say to the audience to get the required response, thingvertising makes us consider what the audience needs to do. And so, in finding a thingvertising solution to the brief we unlock insights about customer behaviour and the practical barriers to change. Those insights inform, influence and improve the advertising side of our work. That’s why we’ve put thingvertising at the centre of our creative process. When we put our minds where the action is we become a better advertising agency.

Healthcare needs thingvertising more than everThe world is changing for healthcare advertising agencies like ours. As product pipelines dry up and prescribing decisions become procurement decisions, we need to look beyond the expected media options and find different ways for brands to intervene.

Old pipelinesThe flow of new products to market isn’t what it once was – and doing better with what we’ve got has become a recurring theme in business plans across the pharma industry. For this reason patient acquisition, retention and adherence are more vital than ever. These challenges can’t be addressed solely by running ads, sending mail or designing sales aids. We need practical ideas and ways to shape behaviour.

New relationshipsThe customer landscape has changed forever too. The sales representative-doctor axis is losing its influence, as the big decisions about what to prescribe are taken at the procurement level by payers and policy makers. The business pitch is no longer a simple matter of ‘please prescribe our pill’; it’s now a case of ‘let’s be partners in managing this disease’. Again, to be successful we need more than concepts and collateral. We must invent tools and projects that make a difference to healthcare professionals and their patients. It’s time to thingvertise

thingvertising.com

© woolley pau gyro: 2014