Insights to action: the fastest way to ace a creative brief

Every year there is a contest held for young creatives called “The Young Ones”, hosted by One Club for Creativity. 

The competition is sponsored by many big-name brands like Dove, and Duolingo, who present participants with a creative brief that includes a specific advertising related problem they need solved. The competition participants then have to create a piece of work based on this brief, outlining their solution to this “problem”. 

Basically the competition mirrors what it is like when a brand gives a creative brief to their agency, and it’s the agency's job to come up with a solution. 

This year Fanta is one of the main sponsors of The Young Ones competition, and in their “brief”, they want to “make Fanta relevant to 18-year olds”.

The problem Fanta faces is that it is looked at as a “kids” brand, and when kids become teens, they stop drinking Fanta. 

Fanta wants to reposition itself as a brand for teens (Gen Z- teens born after 2004). 

The brief 

The challenge participants are tasked with is creating a “brand act” that shows how Fanta “can play a role in popular culture that appeals to teens”. A brand act in this case refers to the activations, stunts, partnerships etc that Fanta could do to appeal to this audience through pop culture. 

Why are we telling you all this? Well the biggest/most time-consuming task agencies are faced with, when they first receive a creative brief like the one Fanta wrote, is research - specifically audience research. 

So, we thought this would be a cool opportunity to show you how Audiense and Affinio can be used to do the audience research for you (quickly), so you can ace every creative brief that comes your way. 

Using the Fanta brief as the example, we’re going to show you just how quickly it is to surface insights on the Gen Z-teens Fanta wants to relate to. 

Let’s get started. 

Audience analysis 

Reminder, the task at hand is to create a campaign that shows how Fanta “can play a role in popular culture that appeals to teens”.’

So step one is learning which pop culture Gen Z teens relate to. This means learning what type of music, TV, movies, clothing, food, social media, celebrities, sports etc. that this audience is most interested in. 

Tools like Audiense and Affinio makes this step very easy. Take a look: 

By running a report on Fanta’s audience, it becomes clear that their largest group of Gen Z fans are “Female Pop Music Fans”, which works out well in our case, because the cluster’s defining interests already fit the “pop culture” theme of the assignment. 

Diving into the report, we were able to surface the following insights: 

Top pop music artists: Austine Mahone, Victoria Justice, and One Direction

TV shows: iCarly, Victorious, and The X Factor

Movies: The Fault, The Hunger Games, and Expelled

Clothing Brands: Aéropostale, American Eagle, and Hollister

Food Brands: Oreo, Doritos, Pringles

Fast Food: Burger King, Starbucks, and Pizza Hut

Social media: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram

Sports: NBA, NFL

Celebrities/ Influencers: Bethany Mota (YouTuber), Lottie Tomlinson (model and makeup artist), and Andrea Russett (YouTuber)

Top Interest Categories: This cluster is very social, they want to spend their time attending events, watching live music performances, hanging with their friends, and dining out. What’s also interesting is their third top interest is self-care (personal care). 

Keeping these insights in mind, we applied what we learned here to the Young One’s “challenge”. 

Remember, Fanta wants to reposition itself as a brand for Gen Zers, and the task was to create a  “brand act” that shows how Fanta can play a role in popular culture that appeals to this audience. 

Here what we now know about Fanta’s Gen Z “Female Pop Music Fans” segment: 

• They love being social and hanging out with friends 
• They also love self-care 
• One Direction is one of their favorite pop music bands
• They like the show iCarly 
• They wear American Eagle 
• Their favorite makeup artist is Lottie Tomlison 
• This audience should be targeted through ads or influencers on YouTube as it is their top favorite social channel

Acing the creative brief

Using the insights surfaced by Audiense and Affinio, we are proposing that Fanta creates a YouTube ad targeted at this Gen Z audience. Our recommendation is that the ad should play in between their favorite YouTubers, Bethany Mota’s or Andrea Russett’s, videos (further ensuring this audience sees the ad). 

In the YouTube commercial, our idea is to have a group of teenage friends (girls) hanging out together in one of the girl's bedrooms. The commercial should show them laughing together while sitting on the floor of the room watching iCarly and drinking Fanta. The girls should be wearing American Eagle (or similar style clothing). There should be One Direction posters on the bedroom walls. The slogan or ad message should say something along the lines of, “Drinking Fanta with friends…a different type of self-care”. 

Here’s why - the idea is for the ad to show that “self-care” (a top interest of this group) doesn't always have to look like face masks and meditation, it can look like hanging out with your group of friends watching TV and drinking pop. 

This commercial relates to this audience's love for self-care AND their love for social hangouts with their friends. It shows a group of friends dressed in the type of clothes this audience wears, watching a show this audience loves, in a room with posters of this audience's favorite boy band. So it mixes their top interests AND their favorite elements of pop culture. It also shows them a new way to consume Fanta as a teenager.

Use Audiense and Affinio on your next brand brief

You can see that by using tools such as Audiense and Affinio, we were able to surface the insights we needed to come up with this winning campaign strategy for the Fanta brief. 

Fanta will announce their Young Ones “winner” May 13th during the “Creative Week” in New York City, and we can’t wait to tune in. 

Although students will likely not have access to tools like Audiense or Affinio to do proper audience research for the competition, the Fanta brief still gave us an excellent opportunity to show marketers how they could use them to ace any brand brief that comes their way.

Try Audiense on your next brand brief, and beat out your competition.