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February 2018

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www.postmagazine.com 13 POST FEBRUARY 2018 ADVERTISING REASSESSING HOW WE APPROACH THE CREATIVE PROCESS TO LEVERAGE IT ACROSS MULTIPLE PLATFORMS rands will always shift their advertising to align with new technology in an effort to get their message in front of their audi- ence. The problem facing brands right now isn't necessarily that shift, it's the fragmentation that's a result of it. There are so many new avenues for advertising being ushered in by emerging tech at an alarming rate, many brands are scram- bling to keep up with it. We see budgets affected by this, as what was once allo- cated to a 30-second media buy, is now spread across several cut-downs, a lita- ny of social posts, a Website refresh and the ever-ambitious immersive AR/VR content. As a creative agency, we need to reassess how we approach and value the creative process in order to better leverage it across multiple platforms. Unified creative is always the goal. Brands want one voice to come through, regardless of whether they're selling the latest fast food combo, or the latest pair of kicks endorsed by the MVP on the court. It's harder to maintain that unified voice when the creative is fragmented into different pieces across different marketing platforms. The easiest way to solve fragmentation is to "reformat" one thing into the other. We see that a lot in social, where a 30-second spot gets a social cut-down. Or worse, it gets a center-cut lift for Snapchat. We've seen it in VR, where films are getting an experience that equates to a VR version of a particular slice of the film or trailer. We're all trying to solve how to better leverage the creative in different ways, but the focus, more often than not, is put on one deliverable, and the rest trickles down from there. We need to think of our creative in a different way. We're not just trying to solve one component of the overall brand experience, we're trying to come up with a unified brand story that can be told differently across platforms. When we go in to present our ideas to brands, we're not walking them through a treat- ment for a single 30-second spot. We're walking them through an idea that can start as a spot, have some interesting exposition in social, and can finish as an AR experience in-store. Think of it like a production designer on a sitcom. They design and engineer the set, and once it's built, that set is used to create con- tent for an entire season. Our creative is more about setting the stage for an entire season of branded content, shot through the lens of multiple formats. On the production side, it only makes sense to leverage the art we've created across as many different avenues as possible. Case in point, We Are Royale has been partnering with the team at Omelet and The Pokémon Company for years, creating 15-second spots for every new card pack that is released. Every time, our team builds CG characters and full CG environments to craft the narratives of the spots. With the latest "Sun & Moon" campaign, we began to leverage those same assets within an AR and VR component, creating an added value proposition to the brand. With the same assets used for commercial, we can create an AR experience that binds those characters to the actual physical Pokémon cards. It effectively became a way to extend the narrative of the spots. These moments of carrying a single creative vision across multiple platforms is what the future holds for advertising. As we get better at recognizing the need for cross-pollination, we'll start to have the foresight to think of the entire marketing push as a whole, and craft a brand story that brings value to every platform. HOW EMERGING TECHNOLOGY IS FRAGMENTING ADVERTISING B BY BRIEN HOLMAN PARTNER/EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR WE ARE ROYALE LOS ANGELES/ SEATTLE WEAREROYALE.COM We Are Royale's LA office (above) and the studio's CG work for the latest Pokemon Sun & Moon campaign (right).

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