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The Hive

Making Brands Behave

“Invent what’s right” is still one of the guiding principles of The Hive. It’s the mantra that reminds the agency to find new ways to express product benefits or brand promise, but beyond that, says Trent Fulton, “we’re really trying to get brands to behave.”

“That means putting brands to work, so they are actually doing things and not just saying things – because we’re competing with a culture that surrounds us all,” says Fulton, the agency’s managing director. “So much content is being created by regular people that is really interesting and involving and funny, and that gets passed around. We have to find a way to have brands interact with that culture. We really try to help brands behave in ways that they are participating and actually doing things.”

A great example of what that means is “Live at the Landmark”, developed for Jack Daniel’s in the US. To help people experience the brand in the most memorable way, The Hive created a series of unique concerts at legendary American landmarks, like Grand Central Terminal, The Playboy mansion and on the USS Midway. Social media was key to the program as it allowed the brand and the audience to share the experience pre, during and post events across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, a first for Jack Daniel’s. In all, the event gained over 30 million social impressions.

To get brands behaving, digital is at the core of everything The Hive does now. Whereas five years ago, a standalone digital creative team would be pulled into a briefing, today the agency’s art directors and writers are well versed in everything from the new digital technology and social media to traditional mass media.

“We’re really lucky because most of our clients seem to embrace that it’s a very new media world now,” says Simon Creet, The Hive chief creative officer. “They very rarely come to a briefing with a pre-purchased block of TV time and are much more open to going where the idea takes you.

“We start with a really tight and insightful description of the target and really try to understand what their media habits are, where they are going, who their influencers are. Then we roll out the idea based on understanding what those true consumer touchpoints are, not just what is going to deliver the most GRPs.”

For “Bicycle Factory”, the Cadbury campaign that gets people involved in helping to send bikes to Africa, those touchpoints ranged from TV to a documentary, from in-store to social media, from PR to a digital hub. Now in its fifth year, as well as being a huge commercial success, a total of 23,340 bikes have been sent to students in Ghana.

Two other Hive campaigns have helped contribute words to the cultural lexicon. For Maynards, The Hive created a “Chewmelier”, a sommelier but for Wine Gums. They rented a booth at a local wine and food expo where the Chewmelier took unsuspecting people through wine tasting for Wine Gums, captured on hidden cameras. The campaign was shortlisted at Cannes Lions 2013.

For Pro-Line, the agency introduced sports fans to their “Sports Gut”, that pre-game intuition that all fans feel. The campaign was launched on TV and online but could also be experienced in-bar and in-venue, where sports fans could become their own sports gut. It has been running for four years and was augmented this year with a campaign to launch POOLS, a new sports betting game.