Why challenger brands need oddly shaped work

Back in my VCCP days, I used to talk a lot about oddly shaped work. This was the sort of stuff that didn't fit neatly into a media plan, and often was the product of time or budget constraints. Often, both.

In deeply practical terms, on reflection I was mostly thinking about earned-led work, in that the idea in itself needed to be engineered so that people would find it in new places and maybe even talk about it.

This is why we, back then, got O2 to work with a code artist to launch the new Nothing Phone. Or got Samsung to create a dance track to communicate a vacuum cleaner. Or got Cadbury to create a gaming tournament to advertise Heroes among parents. All of which did well.

But what I realise now is that all of these campaigns were the result of a context in which the client frankly had the odds stacked against them. They weren't the biggest spender in the category, and that reflected both in available production spend but also media choices.

This is the sort of brief I love. Where you're not the big spender and yet you need to somehow come out of things a relatively big hitter. In short, briefs where the odds are stacked against the brand we have.

I've been obsessed with the idea of odds for a number of years now, starting with the idea that while great work can happen without a single strategist touching the brief, we can make the odds better. We're odd-tilters, if you will. No guarantees, just better chances.

And last week, speaking to a super experienced positioning expert, he in 20 minutes gave me perspective on something I had been missing for a couple of years now. That I love trying to beat the odds.

His argument was simple. Why Salmon Labs? Because salmon, against all odds, swims against the current and finds ways to win. And this is also the reality for a lot of clients. Fuck all time, budget, headspace, or structural differentiators, and yet a need to win.

This explains why I can't find the same level of passion for big sexy brands as I do with scrappy 'boring' ones. The odds are against them. No one expects a payments infrastructure business to be good at communications, which is precisely where our opportunities are.

My somewhat pernicious take on the state of B2B is that the creative bar is so low it's subterranean, and this is how we win. By aiming not even to be 100% more creative, just 10% or 20% sometimes works. And while this may feel like a lack of ambition, I'd argue it's ambition applied to the context of what a business is willing to buy (for now).

Because the other thing about odds is that, as you build a habit to try slightly odd-er things, the results can compound relatively fast. Not just in terms of market dynamics (that takes time), but even in terms of internal confidence. One pilot is a pilot. Two pilots is precedent.

Which brings us back full circle. If the problem is that the odds are stacked against most businesses in most categories, the ironic answer is that oddly shaped work might just be the type of work they need. And for now, it's the sort of work that AI can't always create, and even when it can help create it it's still up to us to learn how to best sell it.