The Good Comms Edit - Issue 23 - 05.10.26
Stop making content & start making things people want to spend time with.
There’s a phrase in marketing that I increasingly think sends us down the wrong path ..
"We need some content"
Content describes what we need to fill ... an Instagram square, a newsletter, a reel or a campaign slot but it says absolutely nothing about why another human being might want to give it their attention.
Three pieces of work caught my eye this week because each does something rather different. One turned a campaign into a television programme, another turned a Christmas catalogue into a character and the last example turned a difficult public-health message into a book people can actually write in.
Not one of them starts by asking what should we post? they start with a much more interesting question ... What could we make that somebody might actually want to spend time with?
1. KFC: your audience doesn't have to stay an audience
KFC has done something gloriously excessive ... they made a game show!
'Don't Crack' premiered on YouTube on 30 September and it's a broadcast-length programme featuring 30 real KFC fans competing through four increasingly ridiculous tests of devotion for £50,000 and the title of “Ultimate Believer”.
All of that is entertaining enough, but the clever communications bit actually began months ago. Earlier this year, KFC's existing Believe in Chicken campaign asked people, “How Much Do You Believe In Chicken?” Campaign material included a QR code leading to a casting page.
According to Creative Salon, 9.8 million people scanned it and more than 50,000 applied to take part. Thirty eventually became contestants, so the people who had previously been watching KFC's advertising became the cast of it.
The Good Comms bit
There's been endless discussion about brands needing to “build community” but community isn't created because you call your Instagram followers a community, it happens when people are given a role.
KFC has spent years creating its deliberately absurd Believe in Chicken world and 'Don't Crack' lets the people who enjoy that world actually enter it ... that's a useful thought even if your communications budget is several zeros smaller!
Could your audience choose, contribute, teach you, perform, curate something? Could they show you what they've made or help shape what happens next?
For a festival, perhaps your audience helps build the playlist, or a gallery might ask it's visitors curate a tiny exhibition from the collection. For a musician, fans could contribute memories connected to particular songs or a community organisation might ask the people using a project to become the people telling its story.
Participation is more powerful than reach because it turns communication from something people receive into something they belong to and you don't need £50,000 and a giant golden egg to do it.
2. Smyths: before inventing a new brand asset, look at the one people already love
Smyths Toys Superstores has just launched a new European brand platform built around something wonderfully old-fashioned ... its printed catalogue.
For more than 30 years, children have waited for the Smyths catalogue, carried it around, circled toys and constructed increasingly ambitious Christmas lists from its pages so rather than inventing an entirely new brand world, Smyths and Droga5 Dublin noticed the one sitting under their noses.
The new campaign turns the catalogue into a child's enormous best friend, a character constructed from more than 700 individual toy models, and is intended to become a long-term brand asset. The campaign is rolling out across eight European markets and across TV, social, digital, stores, offers and the catalogue itself.
The Good Comms bit
We spend a lot of time in branding trying to create distinctiveness but sometimes we overlook the distinctive thing people have already decided matters. For Smyths, the catalogue isn't merely a sales tool, it's a ritual, its arrival signals something, children interact with it in a particular way, adults remember doing something similar themselves.
That's an extraordinarily valuable piece of brand equity and there's a useful exercise here for much smaller organisations ...
What would people miss if you stopped doing it?
Maybe it's the handwritten note that goes into every order, the photograph you always take at the end of a project, the Friday email, the printed programme, the peculiar phrase your customers repeat back to you, the annual event everybody asks about before you've announced it, the recipe that arrives with the veg box.
These things can look small internally because you've seen them a hundred times but repetition is often precisely what gives them meaning externally.
SO ... before creating your next new communications idea, look around for the thing your audience already recognises as yours.
There may be much more story in it than you think.
3. CALM: don't just communicate the message - create a way into it
For Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), the communications challenge is considerably more serious.
For National Poetry Day on 1 October, Ogilvy Health UK created Life Lines, a poetry anthology designed to help men put difficult emotions into words and begin conversations about suicide.
The poems were written by people affected by suicide and grouped around four themes ... pressure, isolation, stress/burnout and trauma but there's one particularly thoughtful detail.
Every poem is 14 lines long, reflecting the campaign's figure that an estimated 14 men die by suicide each day in the UK, and space is left for the reader to write their own lines.
So the object isn't simply something to read, it asks the reader to participate in it.
The Good Comms bit
Some messages are difficult precisely because saying the important thing isn't enough.
“Talk about your feelings.” “Ask for help.” “Start a conversation.”
All perfectly valid but if somebody doesn't know how to begin, the communications problem isn't awareness, it's friction.
Life Lines attempts to remove some of that friction by giving people a structure through which they can start finding the words.
Sometimes communications should do more than tell somebody what you want them to do, it can help them take the first step.
If you're a cultural organisation encouraging somebody to attend for the first time, perhaps you don't need another poster saying 'everyone is welcome'. You need a really reassuring explanation of exactly what will happen when they walk through the door.
If you're encouraging people to volunteer, don't simply tell them volunteering is rewarding, show them the smallest possible way to begin, and if you're asking an audience to respond to an idea, don't say 'tell us what you think' - give them one brilliant question to answer.
The gap between understanding a message and acting on it can be enormous and good communications sometimes builds the bridge.
The thread: attention is earned in the making
A game show, catalogue, poetry anthology ... three very different things but what I find interesting is that none really behaves like “content”.
They're things. Things people can watch, hold, play with, write in, join and remember.
Perhaps that's a useful correction for the way many of us now approach communications and the endless requirement to feed social channels can make us think in units ... We need three posts, a reel, we haven't sent the newsletter, we should probably be on TikTok.
Audiences aren't sitting at home hoping organisations will meet their content quotas, they're deciding, constantly, is this worth some of my time?
For small creative businesses and cultural organisations, that's actually quite liberating because you probably can't win the volume game and you don't need to. You can make fewer things with more thought in them, create a ritual, invite participation, make something genuinely useful, tell a story worth following or give somebody an experience rather than another announcement.
Maybe the better content strategy isn't How can we make more content? maybe it's
How can we make more things that matter enough to become content?
That's Good Comms.