The challenge was pretty straightforward for this project.  To drive awareness and provoke a reappraisal of the potential that targeted TV advertising offers small and medium sized enterprises, showing how the benefits of AdSmart can address their perceived cost and penetration barriers, in an entertaining, simple and informative way.

Our consumer insight was actually really simple too - lots of SMEs would love to be on TV but think it’s not for them because it’s too expensive and most of what they spend is wasted on non-viable prospects.  They prefer the focus of digital, but love the reach of TV.  What they really want is both, simultaneously. And that’s what AdSmart offers.

The concept we went with was rooted in an organising idea -  ‘Think about it, we have’.  It was designed to provoke them to re-consider, to think about it..  A central part of the idea was using AdSmart to advertise AdSmart, and then referencing that in the VO – pointing out that they themselves had been targeted, making it clear that AdSmart is the smarter choice.

We decided to use animation and metaphor to make this point in a simple way.  The animation style allowed us to dramatise both the issue and the benefit clearly and graphically.  And metaphor helped make something potentially complex much simpler.  It also allowed us to show scale on a tight budget, and was easily adaptable for regional and local variations – in the end we made 22 different versions for different regions across the UK.

The campaign broke in October and early results are very good - averaging 2 new advertisers a day in the first month.