The days of brands asking their agency for just an ad campaign to solve all their problems are now pretty rare. Brands want and need much more than that from us. They need ideas that are not only going to transform their communications but will transform their business too.
One of the keys to the success of a transformative idea is data… the cold hard facts. More often than not our job in ad-land is to find those cold hard facts and defrost them, make them relevant, make them grow the brand and the business.
This year, I am lucky enough to be the Jury President of the Creative Data jury in Cannes. So, it’s no surprise that my pick for ‘I wish I had done that’ is a brilliant data idea. I wish I had done… ‘The laugh tracker’ for Tennessee Tourism. This is a brilliant piece of work that has the power to absolutely transform tourism brands and the way parents plan their holidays.
Tennessee Tourism made a simple wearable device for kids that tracked their laughter. They then converted that data into a simple rating scale, or to put it simply – the more laughs the better the rating. This meant that parents were offered a more realistic picture of destinations kids will actually enjoy. So simple, so smart and I really wish I had thought of it first.
So, did it work?
Well, it got 5.9 million searches. It created an uplift of 6.2% of hotel bookings and now they are using the data to see how they can improve the various experiences based on what got laughs and what didn’t.
And the best result of all – it created an entirely new review metric, laughter.
