For every successful brand, there’s an engine of hardworking marketing, built off of actionable insights that got it there. Thousands of executions working in concert, tasked with generating specific outcomes for specific audiences. This isn’t usually the work that shows up at Cannes, or hold the marquee spot in portfolios, or talked about endlessly at panels (but it absolutely can be). It’s the smart, well planned and flawlessly executed work that makes clients love their agencies.
I pride myself on pushing out work that is as purposeful and effective as it is memorable across any medium where an idea can be impactful. Below are some examples of how I’ve worked that approach into the brands that I’ve been in charge of.
A full view of all of my work can be found at dougdarrigo.com and even more on Behance.
Verizon is notorious for their price points, product bundles and incentives. Set in their ways, they love to use them everywhere and often as a solution to solve any marketing problem. For 5 years, I was the agency creative lead as part of a multi-agency team, leading roughly 50 creatives across all digital and offline direct response work. Hundreds of pieces of work per month, across digital (banners, rich media, videos, email, landing pages) and DM to different audiences with different objectives.
When Verizon rebranded, we created Wired Differently, the new Fios brand that highlighted their fiber-optic differentiator.
I started by breaking our client out of their price point-heavy approach by proving out one simple fact: People will not care about an offer if they don’t first care about your brand and product.
That simple point allowed us to balance out our work with more fun and interesting awareness and consideration work. (I’ve duplicated this approach for subsequent clients like Cigna, GoDaddy, Church’s Chicken and more)
I tore down Verizon’s existing marketing approach and created an entirely new playbook. Working with my analytics and planning team, I put together a channel approach and messaging matrix that more efficiently used our creative to nurture leads down a sales funnel from Awareness, through to Acquisition and into Retention and Advocacy. We viewed all creative and strategy through the lens of doing everything differently, because we’re wired differently.
Because we were able to prove out that new and interesting approaches could better achieve our goals across the funnel, we were allowed to do more unique things like Fios Instant Drops and an interesting creative approach to SEO, found in my Wired Differently work.
As a pitch lead, and agency lead as part of a larger mutli-agnecy team, we won Cigna and launched Together All The Way and their global rebrand.
As with Verizon, I was in charge of all digital, social and direct response and created a plan to that used each channel effectively mixing in mini campaigns (like this one for open enrollment) and product to educate, acquire and retain customers.
While not digital, this ask from iStock originally was, until we told them that digital wasn’t the right approach. I firmly believe that the idea and audience should drive the channel it gets executed in, not the other way around.
We were originally tasked with increasing loyalty with art buyers with “something digital”. But, as anyone who’s ever searched for that perfect piece of photography for a deck that was due 2 hours ago, the real retention needs to happen with the people actually doing the searching—Junior and Mid Level Art Directors.
We branded and shipped beer and an Agency drinking game to select agency Art Directors all over the country.
When I took over the Marine Corps they were a traditional-focused brand with no expectation or plan for a conversion funnel. Each piece of creative was expected to magically generate signups while digital and paid social were really just boxes to check with repurposed creative.
Within a month, I created a proper sales funnel as well as taking over comms planning for large campaigns like A Nation’s Call, created mini-monthly campaigns on social media with pieces of content (videos, Facebook Canvases, Facebook Live, IG Stories posts and Gifs) that were designed specifically for the platforms they ran on, and extended traditional work into digital channels with simple executions and digital products.
Our goal was not only to create more engaging and effective creative, but also have a better tie to and help support our hardworking offline work.
At the end of the day there are a few principles I hold true to:
• Every idea needs to be not only unique, but be baked in a strong insight in order to make people care and make it effective.
• Effective creative should only attempt to achieve one thing, so it can do it well.
• Even the most boring assignment can be an award winner if you think about solving a problem for a person instead of executing a tactic.
• The big idea should lead the type of execution and placement. The best ideas should be able to be executed any way anywhere.
Thanks for your time.