Do you need to turn up the heat on your marketing campaigns?

When you see a really gutsy, daring ad, what goes through your mind?

Me, I don’t think about the inspired creative team who came up with a moment of pure genius. No, I always think about the Marketing Director prepared to put it all on the line and convince a large multinational corporation to go with a bonkers but brilliant idea when there is so much – not least your brand reputation – at stake.

But isn’t that what marketing’s really for – to make an impact? And sometimes you’ve got more to lose by creating a mediocre, vanilla campaign that slips under the radar and does nothing to revive brand awareness or sales figures. Now that really will cause a row, even though it might feel like the safest, most comfortable thing to do at the time.

Sometimes our clients come up to us all fired up, seeking a ‘wild creative idea’. And we simply love that. Because the appetite do something extraordinary and fun usually makes for a really standout campaign.

At Moreish Manor, we like to calibrate campaigns we come across against our Campaign Curry Calculator.

It’s super-scientific and it looks a little bit like this:

Ok, so not every campaign can be a Vindaloo. But too many end up being somewhere between a Korma and a Bhuna – just not that exciting.

We think there are 2 main reasons why so many campaigns lack spice:

1. The all you can eat buffet

Stop cramming everything in.

It’s nigh on impossible to create a SLAP, BANG, WOW campaign when you’re trying to get across a million different messages and product features.

Don’t stifle your creativity with clutter. Less is more. (Or Moreish if I’m being a smartass about it.)

2. Can’t handle the heat?

Behind every shit hot Vindaloo campaign is a Marketing Director with some serious balls.

It’s one thing to stick your neck above the parapet and go with the conviction of your creative hunch and a sprinkle of research. It’s another thing entirely to convince the rest of the business to take the risk and fund it.

We salute you.

And we also understand the temptation to create a Cautious Korma. When there are mortgages to pay, reputations at stake and jobs to lose, it’s only natural to want to smother every campaign in a cooling dollop of yoghurt when it comes to campaign sign-off crunch time.

But remember:  When you’re the nutter ordering a Vindaloo and everyone else around the table thinks ‘rather you than me’, if it all goes viral, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll be wishing it was rather them than you.

At Moreish, we’ve been lucky enough to work with Marketing Directors who are ready to do something extraordinary and add a bit of spice into the mix. And the best thing about it is that the fun, excitement and challenge that we have in creating the campaign transcends into the sentiment it delivers to the audience.

Fancy a taster?

How about our series of advertorials, dripping with innuendo that added some sauce to the rather unexciting topic of EU legislation?

Or our totally relevantly irrelevant campaign. Confused? Take a look, it might come in handy for your next pub quiz.