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February 1, 2021 / News

All I Really Want From This Year’s Super Bowl

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January 28, 2021 / News

Super Bowl advertising will look different this year

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January 19, 2021 / CPOVs

The Caged Copywriter: A Day In The Mind

Clark Shepard, Senior Copywriter, Connelly Partners

As a copywriter, it’s my job to take in the world around me, and make sense of it through a myriad lenses and perspectives. It’s my job to get people to be aware of their latent urges. To sow envy and tantalize the senses. To inspire action in my fellow humans. The trouble is, for nearly a year we’ve been asked to take very little action at all. Yes, there is a very real pandemic that the entire world is experiencing together right now. But as a copywriter I’ve found myself experiencing another one entirely…

Writer’s block.

Ah, yes. The pandemic of the mind, attacking a single host between the ears. It’s an affliction I’ve typically been able to solve in a number of ways: A burger and a High Life at the Gallows, pinging some pong with my peers, or taking laps around our four story office in search of snacks and light conversation. But of course this year has been anything but typical, and before you ask, I have indeed run out of synonyms for “unprecedented”.

In the last 10 months I’ve had to completely restructure my days to account for this intermittent, solitary-induced writers block. I don’t claim to have the answers, so you likely won’t find any here. But I do know I’m managing it, so I must be doing something right. With that said, below you will find a log of my typical daily schedule. Perhaps you’ll find something useful, or perhaps you’ll just come away feeling you know far more about me than you ever wanted to.

Either way.

6:00am – I awake to the dulcet tones of Apple’s “Early Riser”. The title of the alarm is “Make Shit Happen!!!”. I turn it off, stretch my arms, beat my chest and fall back asleep for another hour and a half.

7:30am – I am entering stage left to perform a play I have never rehearsed, nor know anything about. The crowd is full, all eyes are on me, the expectations feel impossibly lofty. I contemplate the merits of “wingin’ it”, and I’m throttled awake. My dog is performing a tongue-based lobotomy through my ear canal.

7:39am – I brew my first cup of coffee while freestyling alternative lyrics to the Folgers jingle. The worst part of waking up’s getting tongue punched by your pup. I do this every morning. Different lyrics everytime. I’ve never even had Folgers. Why am I like this?

7:48am – I take the dogs out to do their morning business. The eldest, Pinkerton, arches her back, turns her head and locks eyes with me – unblinking as she relieves herself with vigor. I stare back, envious of her ability to be so unflinchingly present and vulnerable.

8:30am – I put on my workout clothes, roll out the Peloton mat, and lay on my stomach while eating cereal.

8:37am – My phone dings. It’s a Slack. From a brand person. Shit, I think. A brand person. A crippling workload is surely afoot…

8:38 – 10:25am – It is. It very much is. I “Make Shit Happen!!!”.

10:26am – I remember I have a video call at 10:30. I check the invite list to see if I need to wash my hair. It’s just internal. Nice.

10:31am – I enter the meeting slightly late. I do this on purpose, so my introductory joke is received by the largest possible audience. I nail the delivery but alas, I am on mute.

10:31-11:02am – I am hollow inside.

11:35am – my wife enters the room and mouths the words “are you in a meeting?” I mouth back “yes”, even though I’m actually watching a compilation of every “Mac vs PC” commercial ever made. I don’t know why I’ve done this, but the thrill of an insignificant white lie is like crack these days.

12:04pm – I knock out some headlines. They’re total shit. All puns, rhymes, and idioms. I throw them out, and write a few more. They’re worse than the first batch.

12:30pm – I inspect each drawer of the snack cupboard before turning my sights on the fridge. Then I double back to the snack cupboard… before double doubling back to the fridge. I repeat this fruitless loop for a good five minutes before a hangry panic sets in. I settle for peanut butter by way of spoon.

12:46pm – While yoked up on Jif, a peanut butter marketed to small children, I attempt more headlines.

1:30pm – I throw the frisbee for my dogs, and contemplate the meaning they place on their own existence. Chase and retrieve. Chase and retrieve. Are our lives any less linear than that of a domesticated dog? Yikes, I think I need more coffee.

2:24pm – More coffee. The best part of brewin cups, it makes your inner voice shut up. 

2:30pm – I exhaustively research the history of the Folgers jingle. First appearing in 1984, the jingle has been sung by such legends as Aretha Franklin, Randy Travis and Rockapella. Will I ever write anything with this much staying power?, I think to myself.

2:33pm – More headlines. I double down on the rhyming. Hey, it worked for Folgers.

3:00pm – Another video call. I come in hot with the jokes. I’m firing on all cylinders now. I mean I can’t miss. I realize in that moment that I’ve entered the “perfection precipice” – that undetermined period of time in any writers day when the entire english language bows down and pledges fealty. Not knowing how long this sensation will last, I put my video on mute, line up my to-dos…and I black out.

5:49pm – I regain consciousness. My hands, resting on the keyboard, feel pre-arthritic. The laptop is humming like a generator. My left buttcheek is an isolated cadaver (note: always take your wallet out of your pocket before sitting down to work). All work appears to be done, and my  right eye twitch confirms I must’ve been centimeters from my screen the past three hours. Perfection precipice: seized.

6:01pm – I stand up too fast and almost pass out. Coming down from a furious writing session can often feel like a horse tranquilizer entering the bloodstream. It’s totally normal, and, when timed right – replaces the need for an end of day cocktail.

6:03pm – I make a cocktail. A Manhattan. Actually, in my house, it’s called a Mainehattan. Because I live in Maine, and I’m a sucker for low hanging fruit wordplay. You should try my Clark n’ Stormy sometime.

6:46pm – my phone dings. Brand has edits for me. I curse them for not recognizing my genius. I thumb through the edits. They make some compelling points, and I made some egregious grammatical errors. I curse myself.

7:15pm – I help my wife make dinner. I’m like her sous chef, in that I am also in the kitchen. This is where the similarities end. While pouring her a glass of wine I tell her how my idea for a certain food client is going to “revolutionize taco Tuesdays”.

7:45pm – We eat our dinner in front of the TV. I control the remote, and with dictatorial zeal I pause during every commercial to say things like, I bet MMB did that, or what in Gods name was the creative brief for this dumpster fire, or Friggin Wieden… or BABE, BABE MY COMMERCIAL IS ON! BABE LOOK I WROTE THAT! MY COMMERCIAL IS ON! BABE! She loves me unconditionally. I’m almost positive.

9:30pm – I read aloud to my wife in bed every night. Usually historical fiction. Preferably something with loads of accents. Hell yeah I do the accents. The book we’re currently reading, The Huntress, follows the trials and tribulations of a crew of Nazi hunters. A Brit, a Bostonian, a Russian vixen – all arguing over each other constantly. Keeping the characters straight every night is surely helping to stave off the dementia that awaits me in my elder years. I’m sure of it.

10:30pm – I kiss my wife goodnight and return downstairs. At last. Me time. Free from all worldly responsibilities. Free to shut off my brain and let the world spin me around for a spell. Free to satisfy whatever primal urge beckons…

10:31pm – …Those headlines could be better, I think to myself. Where’s my laptop? 

11:05pm – I set my “Make Shit Happen!!!” alarm. I contemplate the alternate universe of my reality. The one where I had only the best ideas today. Where all my jokes landed like a canister of laughing gas. The one where I wasn’t saddled with crippling self doubt. Not even for a second. The one where Covid never happened.

11:06pm – I remember I actually kind of liked my day…

…Because I spent time with my dogs (I’ve never spent this much time with my dogs). I sang my stupid coffee jingles in peace. I still got to laugh with my colleagues. I got to read to my wife. All the work got done. I still have my health. I still get to debate the merits of rhyming and puns for a living. Above all, I was reminded today that my creativity will always be at least one percent stronger than my writer’s block.

Also, the Celtics won. Shwing.

11:11pm – G’Night.

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January 19, 2021 / Thought Leadership

Separating The Noise: Data to Actionable Insights

Brian Kastelein, Director of Data and Analytics, Connelly Partners

As customer touchpoints have proliferated and the cost of capturing, processing, and storing data has become increasingly efficient, the race for data has accelerated and fueled an often unspoken ethos among many marketers that the one with the most data wins. This unrelenting pursuit of ever-expanding volumes of data, however, is often dangerous to customer relationships, not to mention an expensive drain on corporate resources. More data often just means more “noise” and serves to distract from data that can be truly actionable in cultivating customer relationships in ways that drive positive business outcomes.

One way to avoid placing a premium on data for data’s sake is to focus on the collection and classification of data that are directly relevant to the customer journey. From creative concepting to media planning to customer activations, data should ideally serve a dual purpose of generating outputs that quantify and measure results, as well as an input, in the form of actionable insights, that inform and shape future planning.

If data is to fulfill this high calling, cross-team alignment on process is essential. At Connelly Partners, working within the context of clear customer objectives and corresponding campaign measurement plans, the collaboration that exists amongst the creative, media, and analytics teams to develop shared creative and placement naming conventions, as well as standardized campaign taxonomies and tracking specifications is fundamental to our approach.

These are the building blocks that enable more seamless integration of disparate campaign data sources (e.g., media platforms, websites, call centers, etc.), more automated aggregation of results, more powerful visualizations of trends, and more substantive and actionable insights for improving customer engagement and business outcomes.

That said, process alignment and cross-team collaboration alone will not ensure that data can be leveraged to its full potential. Leadership commitment to supporting the right team with the right skills, as well as a foundational set of tools and infrastructure, are corresponding critical success factors.

Yet here again, the emphasis and focus should be on leveraging data against the backdrop of improving the overall customer journey. Too many organizations over invest in tools or human resources to manage ever-expanding volumes of data that never contribute to improving customer relationships or business outcomes.

Best of breed tools and teams of highly credentialed data scientists come at a price. Organizations that see the accumulation of data as a goal in and of itself, will only see the expense side of this financial equation and consistently fall short of realizing a return on their investment.

To that end, our work at Connelly Partners is firmly rooted in a belief that data itself is not a competitive differentiator. Rather, it is how a company strategically combines process, people, and technology to make its data actionable against the customer journey that will determine its competitive advantage and ultimately drive positive business results.

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December 21, 2020 / News

‘More on a Level Playing Field’: How Dubsmash Can Help Reddit Compete

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December 11, 2020 / News

Shannon Airport Hits The Runway with New Festive OOH Campaign

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December 8, 2020 / Thought Leadership

Caution, connection and comfort: A 2020 holiday trifecta

Hillary Williams, Group Brand Director, Connelly Partners

MarketingDive, Contributed by Hillary Williams, December 1, 2020

Anticipation, stress, preparation: all hallmarks of the holiday season. But this year, people are wondering “if” vs. “how” their holidays will happen; stressing over who can join vs. what to serve; and carefully orchestrating safety vs. party preparation. We’ve lost elaborate travel plans and excessive gatherings, but gained carefully timed quarantines, precautionary COVID tests and socially distant celebrations.

The holidays have simultaneously become both less and more of a colossal headache. This leaves consumers trying to satisfy their desire for normalcy with the comfort of the holidays while staying safe — ultimately striking an important balance between managing both physical and mental health. This year it’s more apparent than ever that we crave connection and the holiday traditions that give us structure and guidance — a reliability that especially now, offers refuge from otherwise tumultuous times.

As brands engage with consumers this holiday season, it’s imperative they are not only empathetic, but find useful, actionable ways to foster connection, alleviate stress and enhance the holiday experience.

Adapt to new traditions

Above all, safety remains the top priority this holiday season, and according to a recent study, 76% of respondents will consider the holidays a success if they avoid the health and safety risks of COVID-19. As a result, 26% of people reported avoiding long distance travel or guests, per research from The Hartman Group for the Food Marketing Institute. Based on our recent Connelly Partners survey, 34% of respondents are going to significantly downsize their gatherings with 47% only including immediate family.

With adjusted plans to stay closer to home and celebrate with smaller groups, many may relish in leaving behind long flights and multiple family celebrations in one day. Smaller and tighter budgets for many will likely mean less extravagant holiday spreads.

Some brands already jumped in with portion control solutions. Purdue introduced its ThanksNuggets, replacing the need to buy a whole turkey and bringing shoppers a mixed bag of breast meat nuggets shaped like turkeys and dark meat and cranberry nuggets shaped like drumsticks, touting a “LazyGiving.” While full sized turkeys likely aren’t leaving most family tables any time soon, this was a clever and current twist on a holiday staple that could appeal to younger audiences. Perhaps a new #friendsgiving go-to?

Enhance the unconventional ‘together’ experience

With the prioritization of safety, comes an inherent desire to maintain some semblance of tradition and be emotionally connected through familiar pastimes with family. Over the past nine months, we have redefined what “being together” means with countless Zoom calls and socially distanced outdoor gatherings, so it’s no surprise that 19% of survey respondents plan to hold virtual gatherings, according to The Hartman Group.

However, with a new found tech-savviness comes a virtual fatigue and desire for in-person connection, so many will likely find themselves taking extra steps to get tested in order to be in the same indoor spaces. As we see so many families jumping through hoops to find ways to be together — whether that’s waiting in line for two hours in the freezing cold for a COVID test or coordinating outdoor, distanced dinner tables — it’s a reminder that the core of the holiday season is surrounding yourself with loved ones. Corny? Yes. True? Also yes.

This year has left us desperate for the comfort of connection this holiday season and by helping to bridge that daunting gap, brands will help solve a major consumer challenge. Jose Cuervo is facilitating togetherness by creating life-sized cardboard cutouts for people to ship to family and friends. These “dopple-drinkers” not only help ensure no one misses a group family photo this year, but provides what all of us could use a lot more of these days — a good laugh.

Dial up the comfort

In addition to connecting with family, another way consumers are holding onto holiday traditions is through the comfort of mealtime. Our Connelly Partners survey found that 36% of respondents are planning to rely on traditional staples with 23% incorporating additional comfort food. Due to widespread cooking burnout after nine months of the majority of meals made at home, 30% are planning to do less overall this year, The Hartman Group research found. With stress at an all-time high, now is the time for brands to help us all create space for feel good moments and alleviate stress. Whether it’s focusing on indulgent, easy recipes (read: pasta, cheese, chocolate) or hacks to cut down holiday meal time prep — delicious, filling and easy should be the name of the game this year.

The dual stress around this uncharted holiday season and yearning for moments of normalcy create a complex emotional need state for brands to navigate. But if done well, it also creates an opportunity to make a genuine impact in consumers lives and inject happiness, comfort and connection at a time when we all need it most.

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December 8, 2020 / News

Caution, connection and comfort: A 2020 holiday trifecta

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December 2, 2020 / Thought Leadership

How Brands That Cut Staff Can Reinvent Themselves

JoAnne Borselli, Group Brand Director, Connelly Partners

Mediapost, Contributed by JoAnne Borselli, December 1, 2020

Every business segment has been impacted by COVID-19, but none has been hit at the same epic proportions as travel.

Everyone’s seen the stats. Countless employees have been laid off, with more to come as Congress stalls on further aid packages. Beyond the front-line (and typically lower- tenured) jobs, a lot of cuts have happened at the corporate level — of United. Of Marriott. And of every smaller hotel, airline, travel agency, restaurant and theme park. Employees with long tenure and deep experience have been let go.

What will that mean for the future of the industry? If long-tenured employees are replaced with 20- and 30-somethings who were still children during 9-11, will that matter? Or does the industry need such a major reinvention that historical perspective doesn’t mean anything?

As with most things, I like to believe the truth lies in the middle. If you’re a travel brand trying to “rethink normal” — or any kind of brand that’s been forced to cut personnel — here are some things to consider:

Less experience can equal new ideas. Use fresh perspectives to reimagine how you do business. Challenge your team to think in terms of “what if?” What would have happened if the founders of Uber had consulted with lifetime cab drivers when building their business? Rather than providing the standard amenity, one hotel brand is surprising guests by monitoring social media around its properties, and  sending champagne to guests who got engaged earlier in the day.

A few years back, Four Seasons began selling its bedding online. Who would have predicted the brand loyalty that would create now, when guests are able to enjoy a little piece of the experience at home until it’s safe to visit again.

Use experience where and when it matters most. Hire an experienced consultant (even temporarily) who can help you avoid pitfalls when solving specific challenges. You don’t have time for mistakes. There are plenty of smart folks out there looking to share what they know. Maybe you’re looking at different ways to drive more revenue per booking. Hotels and airlines have been using dynamic pricing for years and have learned how to make those platforms work best. Use that experience to guide you quickly and avoid mistakes you might not see.

Look outside your teams for forward thinking and support. An agency partner can approach your brand with a fresh perspective. This is a time to think differently, to do the customer research and think about how that impacts who you are and what your relevance is. Then develop a brand promise that shows you’re listening.

It’s also a great time to look outside to help strengthen areas that have been weakened by layoffs, like: your paid search strategy, digital media trends, social media content. This might be the time to outsource until you can get your feet back on the ground.

For the industry to survive, it’s going to need to push outside of its comfort zone in a way it never has. Successful travel brands will find the magic between new perspectives and past experience, and use that magic to create a new vision for the future.

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December 1, 2020 / News

How Brands That Cut Staff Can Reinvent Themselves