When Robin Smith, executive director of the BC Dairy Foundation, received a written satisfaction guarantee from Palmer Jarvis DDB, Vancouver, at the agency’s pitch for the business, he couldn’t help but do a doubletake.
The guarantee stipulated that if the client wasn’t satisfied with the agency’s ‘Don’t take your body for granted’ strategy, the shop would produce a new ad campaign – for free. ‘I said: ‘Is this for real?’ and they said: ‘Yes, it’s what we’re here for.” It was an offer that Smith just couldn’t refuse.
For PJ DDB, that guarantee is an inherent proposition in the client-agency relationship. ‘It’s something we believe in strongly as a company,’ says Rob Whittle, PJ’s national president. ‘We put our commitment on the line [because] we really felt that we could change milk consumption patterns.’
This promise laid the groundwork for the client’s trust in PJDDB – and that trust has been integral to the development of a wacky campaign.
As a client, BC Dairy Foundation is unique: A non-profit whose mandate is to increase milk consumption in B.C., it represents a board of dairy farmers. So convincing a group so far removed from the target to run with the innovative ‘Don’t take your body for granted’ campaign, which stars bodiless characters experiencing difficulty accomplishing daily tasks, couldn’t have been easy.
PJ got there by proving it knows the target inside and out – and walking the board through the steps of acquiring that knowledge. In the words of Fiona Ahrens, project director for BC Dairy Foundation, when you work with PJ, ‘you feel like you’re in the hands of a good doctor.’
‘We really had the support of the board throughout this whole process,’ says Bill Baker, SVP, director of brand management for PJ DDB. ‘We took them through the qualitative research results. We presented the campaign concept to them and got their buy-in before production. And we prepared them for some certain negative feedback once the campaign launched.’
And indeed there was some negative feedback, in the form of phone calls to board members from constituents. Baker describes how one (former) board member, Wally Smith, defended the work: ‘He said, ‘Listen, I’m not sure I entirely get this campaign either. I see the ads. I think they’re kind of weird. I shake my head in bewilderment. But my teen-aged kids love them. They laugh hysterically every time they see them, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
In the end, says Baker, ‘they didn’t panic, and neither did our day-to-day clients [Ahrens and Smith]. They stayed calm throughout and reminded the callers that: ‘One, we have tried everything else in the past and nothing has worked, and two, we knew that we would need to be different if we wanted to get different results.”
It has also helped that 10 people from the agency – from strategic point Bill Baker to account executive Svetlana Connelly – work on the BC Dairy account on an ongoing basis, and key people on both sides talk often.
Angela Scardillo, MD of Kid Think, PJ’s youth marketing division, has also been a key player in developing the insights that have gone into the campaign. Scardillo says a very casual, open relationship with BC Dairy – which has seen the client work out of the PJ office from time to time – has enhanced respect on both sides.
Kid Think developed its strategic insight by ‘living with this category day in, day out,’ says Whittle. It developed an online panel of youth aged 16 to 24, to whom it can send e-mails or surveys for feedback. As well, the teens keep shopping journals and trend albums of visual images they find appealing.
Scardillo says that, for the milk campaign in particular, they asked teens to create ‘mood boards’ depicting how they envisioned milk drinkers. ‘Visually, it was a beautiful way of communicating without words,’ says Scardillo. ‘Some kids aren’t as articulate as we need them to be, but a picture is worth a thousand words.’
So far this process has worked: while it’s still too early to gauge sales results, (with the exception of the 250/500 ml flavoured milk cartons favoured by teens, which have seen a 20% increase in sales this year over last) a recent Ipsos-Reid poll was telling.
Of the young people polled, 64% said the ‘Dogwalker’ ad gave them a good reason to drink milk; 80% said it was something people their age could understand and 83% found it ‘very enjoyable to watch.’
And certainly, the Dairy Foundation’s heads have turned heads; the campaign has already been awarded two gold Bessie awards, a silver at the Clios and a bronze at Cannes.
This is the fourth article in a five-part series examining agency/client relationships. The final instalment will appear in the Nov. 17 issue of Strategy.
