Juhi Kalia of Facebook Creative Shop shares these pointers for advertisers
By Nicai de Guzman
Juhi Kalia, Head of Creative Shop, Facebook (Global Brands APAC & India), started her talk with a question – do data, technology, and tools need humanizing or do traditional notions of creativity and storytelling need to wake up to how technology has changed human behavior?
She gave an example which she thought married technology and humanity quite well – Facebook’s Pedigree Adoptable Mask, a mask or filter within the Facebook app that aims to provide homes for shelter dogs. When a user nods his or her head while wearing a dog’s mask that means that user is interested in adopting that dog. If the user shakes his or her head, the app will find another mask and hopefully, it’s a dog that the user likes. It’s a creative execution using sophisticated technology… but what does it mean to be truly creative nowadays?
The three levels of connection
“Right now everyone is creative. There are so many people creating content on social media everyday and some of it are better than what agencies or creative people make,” Kalia said.
“And what is this doing? There is much content out there. But are brains aren’t changing. If anything, our lives got busier and harder. My attention span is still what it was but I have so many choices,” she added.
According to Kalia, 84% of what brands put out is wasted. In the 2000s, a distracted consumer has a 12-second attention span. It went down to 8 seconds in 2013 and now, it’s down to 2.8 seconds.
“You get a lot of people saying but people are watching Netflix, they’re binging for six hours. Sure they are, but that’s not advertising. That’s content that they’re opting to watch,” Kalia explained.
The good news is that people think and behave differently on mobile. It takes less than a minute to swipe right in Tinder. The same thing is true in seeing ads in social media. It takes less than a quarter of a minute to decide whether you like an ad or not. This is called thumbstopping. And for an ad to be thumbstopping, Kalia recommends a three levels of connection with the consumer
“What this does is the first couple of seconds is critical right you have to catch people’s attention really quickly you have to be instantly interesting,” she said.
- Level One: Catch Their Attention – Something different or surprising.
- Level Two: Give Something That Will Delight Them – Something that delights you, surprises you, makes you smile or makes your day slightly better.
- Level Three: Create A Meaningful Deep Connection – It doesn’t happen because of a surprise or a visual connection, it happens when you tap something deep.
Her example is a four-second Lysol ad of a bear protecting a child while crossing the street. The statement said, “Protect like a mother,” which is in line with Lysol’s current campaign of “What it takes to protect.”
“On social media, on Facebook, we want to make sure we create deep meaningful connections. How can a brand be part of that without distracting it?” she asked.
The three levels of changes and three filters
Aside from the three levels of connections, Kalia also presented the three levels of changes. The first one is changing the mind of the consumer, which is simply convincing them to switch brands or buy your product. The next one, changing hearts is more complicated because it entails tapping the consumers emotionally. The last one, changing cultures, is also about emotions but on a grander scale. For example, what all mothers feel, what all women feel, etc.
Her example is the award-winning Fearless Girl by McCann New York. And when you want to change something and create a campaign, Kalia mentioned three filters – technology, insight, and time.
“When you look at these filters, when you marry these three things, you get an idea and what you get at the center of it is really powerful,” she said.
She further simplified these to How, Why, and When. How represents Technology, Why represents Insight and When represents Time.
“The trouble is, because of so much technology talk and everyone’s digital, everyone always starts with the how. Sometimes that works and that’s fine but I really genuinely think that when you start with the Why, it’s gonna be big and it’s gonna be powerful,” Kalia said.
“So you start with the why, you figure out when, and then you figure out how. What technology will I use to make this idea more sharp or more powerful?” she asked.
An example she showed is how the Netflix series Narcos listened to their viewers’ delight in the show’s excessive use of swear words. Because of this, they created a series of video tutorials teaching their viewers how to swear in Spanish. This campaign resulted in 12 million views, 40% increase in followers, more than 50 million people reached.
Another example is a chatbot that aids people with Alzheimer’s. The chatbot is integrated with Facebook. They can easily chat with themselves and with specialists so they can remember things about themselves and their daily lives such as appointments.
A clever use of the Facebook Live feature, Kalia shared, is the Old Spice challenge. The brand had a new deodorant that claimed it works up to 48 hours. They used Facebook Live for 48 hours that tested a guy who was wearing this new variant. He was made to do challenges and every once in a while, people would come in to smell him.
Kalia also shared a creative and human-centric approach to their Facebook stories feature. It was done by Justice and Care, a foundation in India that spread awareness about girls’ abductions. The group created Facebook stories that told the story of a girl that was abducted. It was made to look like it was happening in real time. The insight was that the first 24 hours was crucial during a girl’s abduction.
“The Facebook stories disappear after 24 hours, just like the girl,” Kalia said.
With all her examples, she stated how all of it started with an insight first. It was later followed by technology and time.
“I want to just end with three very quick questions – are you digital? Are you creative? Are you human?”
Watch Juhi’s session here:
