Yep. we’re back for another edition of Going Beyond the First Idea. Our content series where we don’t just focus on the links and coverage achieved, but the idea and strategy behind them.
How many of you have been in a brainstorming session and it’s just crickets? Yeah, me too. I am someone who prefers to take space to come up with ideas in my own time and then bring them to the table – maybe I’m just not good in crowds.
But it’s a fact, that coming up with ideas is hard, and coming up with unique ideas is even harder. Sometimes you can be in a brainstorming session trying to get blood from a stone – but sometimes the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. You need to take a step back, do your research, and let the idea come to you, and that’s exactly what I did here.
The brief we were given:
“create a creative campaign that builds links to the car insurance category with the target audience being young drivers.”
Insurance is a tough niche. Nearly every comparison website is spending tens of thousands on digital PR and the difference in revenue between being 1st and 5th in the SERPs is huge – this is a space you need to be different in.
Coming up with the idea
Young drivers and car insurance. Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind and tell me why It’s university students. Obvious right? Yeah, that is why we call this series going beyond the first idea – because although the first idea can be on the right lines, you need to innovate beyond it or you are just in a sea of sameness
So here’s the process of how I attacked this brief. A classic theme analysis – but on a few different levels.
First off I wrote down anything relating to the core product (car insurance). These would become the starting points of ideation. I then wrote down themes that the target audience would be interested in/that affected them. These can be anything from problems to interests.
It looked a little like this (I didn’t do it on my phone, promise):
To build out lists like these you can use Google, Also Asked, chatGPT, or even more creative – your brain. It’s just a top-level list. But now you have a tonne of themes you can start exploring further.
But something that is often forgotten about is seasonality. What time of year are we launching the campaign? Are there any sporting events coming up? Any big social events? What marketable days are coming up? This should help focus your ideation.
From here you can link up the product with target audience interests.
You will end up with some super obvious ones here…
- Roadtrips + destinations
- Supercars + social media
- Emissions and travel
But at this stage, you can do more research and do better. These are ideas every other PR agency will be coming up with. Just because you can link the core product to the target audience’s interest doesn’t mean it will be what journalists want to write about.
For this campaign, we were coming up to the summer period and a few of our audience interests would be much more press-worthy during this time (summer holidays, road trips, going out etc.). We needed to explore these themes further.
So what next? Well, one of the most important things in any PR campaign is having emotion behind the story. This is how you connect the story to brands, journalists and consumers.
So how do you find emotion within themes? Here are a few things I run through:
- Search themes on Buzzsumo to see the social reactions to the articles
- Search the themes on Instagram & TikTok and head to the comment section, what are people saying?
- Head to any Facebook group or subreddit and scrape the comments. What are people passionate about? Communities are a forgotten gem in ideation and outreach.
From this, we whittled down the core themes to festivals (niched down from music), road trips, road safety, drink driving and alcohol (going out).
A quick look on Buzzsumo told me that these areas get talked about in the press, a lot…
These themes ticked all the boxes. High press evidence, linking to the core product, and what consumers would read about.
However, themes aren’t ideas – but they can lead your brain down the right path. Through further research, we found a common topic that kept coming up.
Drink driving at festivals.
We found that 63% of people travel via cars to festivals in the UK – that’s a lot of (predominantly young) people driving.
There’s a problem here. Could we solve it with a campaign? And could we use it as an educational opportunity?
The Idea
Uswitch already offered temporary car insurance. We just needed to connect them to the problem with a solution. With festival season just around the corner, it was the perfect time to run a campaign doing so.
We launched A temporary festival car insurance – your mates can drive you home if you’ve had a few too many the night before. Here’s the slide we pitched:
The idea ticked the emotion box and was a service that solved a problem.
If you don’t feel safe driving after a festival, get one of your friends to get the group home instead.
The execution
We get data in a variety of ways for our campaigns, internal, scraping, one singular insight… but for this we opted for a survey. We ended up with some headline stats:
🚘 63% of people wouldn’t wait until they felt sober enough to drive home from a festival
🍺 1 in 5 people don’t consider their alcohol consumption when deciding how to get home from a festival
A lot of PR companies are just stopping at this point, whacking it in a press release and sending it out to hundreds of journalists.
But this is lazy – it’s 2024 and digital PR campaigns need to be working harder than this. Consumers are across multiple platforms and we should be too. Here’s how we executed this:
For the execution we needed to link back to our objective – we wanted category links. Uswitch already had a page for temporary car insurance so we just added some additional copy, CTAs and graphics to the page. If the journalists were writing up this story it was the natural move to link to it.
But again, we couldn’t stop there.
The stats showed that this was a real problem – therefore we created social assets for Uswitch’s owned channels:
This was a campaign that could be executed over the entire summer. Although it was linked to a seasonal event, the festival season lasted throughout summer and gave us lots of local outreach angles for each festival.
We even created assets that would work for specific festivals and our outreach:
How can you make festivals link to cars? Number plates, obviously.
A full imagination campaign
We call this a full imagination campaign. A creative campaign that not only works for PR but works on other channels too.
But here’s the takeaway, next time you head to a brainstorm – think if you can solve a consumer problem.
NB. If you’re thinking you have seen similar creative before, you’d be right. Mcdonald’s did a number plate campaign in August 2023 – a creative even accused them of plagiarism around it.
Buuuuut we did execute ours well before the summer of the same year. It’s always nice to know we are on the same page as the McDonald’s creative team.
