Speaker 1: Let me show you an easy framework to sell your creative ideas with an example from Burger King. Have you ever been in a pitch where you have an idea that you think the client could surely not turn this idea down? The strategy is solid, it's a cracking creative idea, the presentation seems to flow and then there it is. The client just doesn't quite get the idea. It just doesn't seem to land the same way as when you and the team were running through it. This is the experience that most of you are familiar with during the presentation. The client's slight frown, the client who keeps asking questions, the client who's whispering to other clients, the client who's staring intently at the presentation and the client scribbling in their notebook on almost every slide. You'll know the scene. These are the telltale signs the presentation is missing something. More often than not, it's the context that's missing. Context for the idea. I'm going to show you how your idea can step up and not play catch up when presenting to the client. Let's discuss what most agencies do. What many agencies do is that they go through the strategy to tee up the creative idea. Therefore, the creative idea often gets a slide for the concept and a teaser sentence or a paragraph before just launching into each execution slash touch point. If it's an easy execution, then it's not a problem. However, if it's a big idea with multiple channels or phases, you want to provide context and show the scale up front. Giving context to the idea helps the story of the creative solution to flow more smoothly and to allow your client to be on the journey with you. Remember, you've been looking at the work for the last several days or weeks. You know the backstory. Your client doesn't. Also, agencies often don't have the capacity to support each and every slide with lovely visuals when it's pitch time. The key issues that agencies face with this are time, budget and idea overload. It's just not possible to ask your creative team to give every slide the gold treatment from visual illustrations and graphic design. Besides, you need the idea to sing and for clients to pay attention to the idea. The answer, context, due diligence and feasibility. Context is to show why it works. Due diligence is to show that you have explored how it will work and feasibility. You show that it will work. We want to eradicate the need for questions, queries and concerns. One of the frameworks I teach in the Strategy Finishing School to solve this problem is to Storify the Idea. So, what is that? Storifying the idea is a one-page story for the concept. There are four key parts to present the concept. The creative strategy idea, the beginning, the middle and the end. How does it work? The creative strategy statement sells the creative objective across each chapter. Our chapters sell the idea in a story format to take our listeners on the journey with us. Typically, I would play an example and then break down how the process works. However, to show how these techniques work, I'll reveal the process with an example. Because with the example case study, it breaks down the campaign into detail. This type of detail would be needed for each slide in the presentation. Drilling down into this level of detail would raise questions and could confuse the client. So, let's sell the idea, then move to the details. Let's use the Burger King, most famous griller in Peru as an example. So, the idea is to turn compliments to the chef into food envy. The fame was to turn a Burger King employee under an alias into a local sensation, using celebrity compliments for their grilling skills to flame a PR story. Packing cameo to get our endorsements and turning them into a hype story so that guests want to try the burgers. Fire, burn everyone's expectation using Burger King social channels to reveal the chef gained his skills on the Burger King grill. Drawing people from the local sensation story back to Burger King, reinforcing the quality of the burgers and making guests want to try them. Fortune, turning the thrill back to grill and giving guests the opportunity to taste the burgers by the Burger King chef sensation. Firing up the hype again by hosting an exclusive burger party at Burger King. That's the creative strategy walkthrough. Now, let's look at the case study.

Speaker 2: In Burger King Peru, we wanted to have some celebrity endorsements. But hey, we're talking about a third world country, you know. The good news is that we discovered Cameo, an app where celebrities charge between $100 and $500 for people to send personalized messages to their friends.

Speaker 3: Happy birthday to you.

Speaker 2: But there is a small caveat. Cameo does not accept brands. So, we hacked it. Introducing the most famous griller in Peru. He is Guber and we made him famous via Cameo. We just had to ask some celebrities to compliment his barbecue skills.

Speaker 4: Then we shared these videos anonymously with websites and influencers specialized in entertainment who went crazy when they heard different celebrities mention a Peruvian. From there, everything exploded.

Speaker 5: Guber, can I come over? I would like to come over and have a burger. I hear they're world famous.

Speaker 3: You know what? I was trying to get to Peru so that I could get me some of Guber's famous grilled burgers. I hear that you make the best grilled burgers in Peru.

Speaker 5: Rumors are that Guber makes the best bloody grilled burgers in Peru.

Speaker 3: They and more expect that when they visit Peru, Guber will receive them with a good burger that they considered could be the best in the world.

Speaker 2: A few days later, we used our social media platforms to reveal that Guber has six years' experience cooking in our restaurant, 100% beef burgers on the grill, and that's why he's a grill king. As everybody was kind of crazy to try his hamburgers, we organized a party in our restaurant. We invited other world-class grillers who happened to be some of our most experienced employees. Spending just a couple of hundred dollars on celebrity messages for Guber, we generated an unprecedented response on social media and a total of $650,000 in earned media. And nobody missed the opportunity to try his awesome hamburgers. Well, almost nobody.

Speaker 6: I can't believe I missed it, bro. When can we organize? When can you do it again, bro? I want to be there. I need to be where the best burgers are. Guber, get it, dog. Come on, baby, invite the dog.

Speaker 1: As you can see, the idea is simple, but detail isn't. An idea like this can easily lead to numerous questions and sow seeds of doubt in the plot. Having the Storify framework slide up front gives the idea the context it needs and takes the guests on a journey when presenting the rest of the idea. Everyone is on the same page. We've laid out the concept and given context to the idea. Now we can present the detail behind each step of the journey. Context is often missing from the idea. We want to avoid doubt in the idea. Using the Storify tool removes doubt and provides clarity. It contains the creative strategy statement, a beginning, the middle and an end. It provides clarity by giving the idea a short story to take your listener on a journey before delving into the detail. Creative strategy helps to support how the idea comes to life and on which platform, but it falls within comms planning. So a tool like Storifying the idea is only one part of selling in the creative idea and should be supported with the tools and techniques of comms planning. If you're new to comms planning, you can learn more about it on my YouTube video, What is comms strategy? Where I share my best in class examples from Nike, Cole Haan and Tylenol. In the strategy finishing school, the comms planning module will teach you all the tools and techniques to sell integrated work using a range of brand and examples, including creative strategy. I've also created the free guide of the four most essential comms planning documents. I'll leave a link in the comments for you to access that. Thanks to strategy finishing school member, Matt Osborne for helping to create this great video.