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- [00:00]
Fergus O'Carroll
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O'Carroll in Chicago. We are now, as I announced a couple of weeks ago, the official podcast partner of the Fes worldwide, super excited about that and what's to come. And part of what we're doing is we're going to be going to some of the major FE galas. For example, in New York on May 22nd is the FE Awards Gala Night. And we're going to be there to record content with some of the winners after they come off stage, so to speak, and create a lot of content and conversation. Then there'll be a bunch of new episodes coming out of those immediate EFFIE winners here in the US and we're going to do the same in London later in the year and hopefully the same in Dublin later in the year. I'm also thinking about possibly doing another live episode from New York just in advance of the effie's, trying to figure out if we can make that happen logistically. Thinking about May 21, which would be that the night before the Effie's Gala and thinking about making something happen there. So I'll let you guys know more over the next couple of weeks, what we decide to do. We are in Sydney, Australia in two weeks. That's April 16, 2025. We're going to be in Sydney for a live recorded show. There's so much great content, so much great creativity coming out of Australia and New Zealand. So we're going to go down there to talk to some of the best people on the cutting edge of a lot of this thinking we've got. Our show in Sydney is breaking the laws of average and we have some of the best, not only strategic thinkers, but also creative thinkers. Tom Martin is Chief Creative Officer of the Special Group in Australia, producing some phenomenal work. Another agency down there, BMF Stephen DeWolfe, is their chief Creative Officer. He's going to be joining us alongside Fran Clayton. She's a CSO at Ogilvy, Rupert Price, who is CSO at DDB group, and Milla McPhee, who is chief strategy officer at Droga5. So very exciting to go down there. The week following that we're going to be in Auckland, New Zealand. And that is another brilliant market where there's a ton of great stuff for a relatively small geographic market. It's producing at amount of great stuff. And so our topic for Auckland is Lessons in Punching above youe Weight. And we have Rory Gallery, chief Strategy Officer of the Special Group in Auckland. We have Lisa Dibbett Chief Strategy Officer, Dentsu. Rob Kemble, Chief Strategy officer at Colenso BBDO and Stevie Weber, she's our chief strategy officer at Drogo 5. You can get tickets for both of these live shows on our website under the Live tour tab at onstrategy showc. The the Auckland date is Wednesday, April 23. I hope to see you there. I also wanted to thank our live tour sponsors, Tracksuit, Wark and the Effies. These are three brilliant brands doing wonderful things in support of our industry. I really would encourage you to check them out and support them in the same way that they're supporting this show. Here's a clip from today's episode.
- [03:28]
Catherine Willoughby
We probably had a few ways of framing that. Like one could be saying the toy experts or the experts you trust. But the most interesting one, and the one we presented to the client was 4Kids by Bigger kids. Who is a better expert on kids than kids? And we're the best.
- [03:51]
Fergus O'Carroll
That's so good.
- [03:52]
Catherine Willoughby
So there's an example of how they would. They were kind of. Yeah, the same point. So we just chose the most. The most pointed or sticky one.
- [04:00]
Fergus O'Carroll
So where did that come from? Does that come from you? Does that come from Rick? I mean, do you remember? I mean, that's the magic of our business. That's what we do best, is bringing some sort of an emotional reaction to a really short, compelling, spiffy little line.
- [04:20]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah, I think that came from the three of us bouncing it around, to be honest, and just saying it out loud in different ways until we got somewhere that seemed funny.
- [04:29]
Fergus O'Carroll
I love that. That's so good. That's Catherine Willoughby. She is strategy director at Adam and Eve DDB in London. You may remember her, she was on the show a couple of months ago talking about Disney's Boy and the Octopus film that went out around Christmas time. Today we're going to be talking about the entertainer. It's a toy shop in London. And what I love about this episode, it is almost a master class in accelerated planning. They didn't have a lot of. They had a great core team. They had a bunch of thinking that was generated off of some anecdotal conversations. They got to a human truth, which was that kids go really charmingly deep into their obsessions and then drop them overnight. And it's that sort of a simple human observation that was built out into a number of different strategic directions. The one that I love the most, it was not the one that they ended up choosing, but it was for kids, bigger kids. And when you know you'll see my response in the actual episode. I loved that direction. Where they ended up going was for whatever they're obsessed with. So here it is. Kathryn Willoughby, this is the Entertainer. Enjoy. So we are here to talk about the phenomenal story behind the Entertainer. Can you explain for the audience what is the Entertainer?
- [05:58]
Catherine Willoughby
Yep. The Entertainer is a high street toy store. So it's a chain of shops all across the UK. They also sell toys online. It started about 40 years ago by a dad who wanted to have a better toy shop kind of option.
- [06:16]
Fergus O'Carroll
So we used to have over here in the US we used to have a chain of retail stores, national chain called Toys R Us, and they don't exist anymore. They're trying to sort of claw their way back into some new sense of having a brick and mortar presence, but nothing, but nothing like it was. Do you have those big national chains like that in the uk and this is. And of course, in this case, the Entertainer is a toy store. It's a chain, but it doesn't have the footprint of others and the awareness levels of others. Right?
- [06:51]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes. We've had Toys R Us as well in the UK and we've got the same situation where those large out of town, big footprint retail units have kind of gone down as shopping habits have changed and people have been buying more of their bulk stuff online. But Toys R Us would have been considered a competitor for the Entertainer, and so would a similar brand called Smith's Toys Superstore, which is again out of town, large warehouse type toy store. But that's probably the biggest national chain apart from that. There's also Argos, which has a slightly different business model of a catalog approach, where you browse the catalog, which you now do digitally when you're in the store, and then they have a warehouse behind where they go and fetch the item for you. They sell a lot of homewares and furniture and things, but also toys is a big offering from them. And then finally, the Entertainer's biggest and fastest growing competitor as a toy marketplace, I would say is Amazon. Everyone's biggest, fastest growing competitor.
- [07:57]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah, it certainly has had a huge impact. I know that here in Chicago, the toy stores, the retail toy stores tend to have a specific niche target. For example, there's one close to us that it just focuses on what it determines as sort of educational toys. But this is not the case with the Entertainer. A, it's a. It's a broad offering in a retail establishment that also has a digital presence, right?
- [08:27]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes. Broad offering toy store, I would say Their positioning as for what they offer is discounting and low price, good sort of good value toys. So they'll often, often be doing slash prices and running. I think they have a philosophy something like stack them high and move them fast or something like that.
- [08:50]
Fergus O'Carroll
That's great. Yeah. So what was the business problem that they were facing?
- [08:57]
Catherine Willoughby
The main business problem is low awareness across the UK and especially with the younger aged parents. So older parents who whose children were growing up a couple of decades ago are more have higher awareness levels of the entertainer because I guess their growing up kind of toy shopping experience looked a lot more like wandering down the local high street and then that this shop was there. Whereas today's younger parents don't share that same experience necessarily. So it's declining awareness, especially with younger audiences. And that's of course the key people, you know, the new parents is who they need and want to recruit.
- [09:38]
Fergus O'Carroll
Had they been advertising in the past or is this the first time that they've been doing a bigger campaign with an agency like Adam and Eve?
- [09:46]
Catherine Willoughby
No, this would be the first time. So they had never done any brand advertising.
- [09:50]
Fergus O'Carroll
Is that simply because they didn't believe in it or they spent all their money on performance marketing or they weren't even marketing at all?
- [09:58]
Catherine Willoughby
I think they'd never seen or really felt the need to do brand advertising sort of when they were setting out and growing and trading on foot traffic and of people kind of passing by. And then in more recent years where that it hasn't been enough and they felt this slipping. That's where the businesses realized they needed to do something different. So they brought in new management. And the new CEO and interim, interim CMO that they brought in last year were both ex John Lewis. So that was where the connection came to Adam and Eve because they had both experienced working with us before and seen the power of emotional brand building for John Lewis over the last decade and, and beyond. And so they came in to turn around the fortunes of this business and knew and believed that a very strong route to doing that is investing in emotional brand.
- [10:57]
Fergus O'Carroll
I can't, I can't tell you how many times I hear that sort of a dynamic that happens on this show with great work, a new cmo, it's either the company is sold or there's some sort of a pivot point that is signaling an openness to a fresh start. Whether it's new people, new CEOs or it's a really bad business situation. It's unfortunate that it has to be difficulty that motivates Turning the sort of the eyes of the marketing and the creative in a new direction. But it unfortunately does. So that's great context to talk about this. So these guys know you, you know them, what's the brief and what does planning do to sort of get oriented to this, to this new brand and its situation?
- [11:45]
Catherine Willoughby
It was actually a really interesting one to even get to the brief for this project because the clients came in and we sat with them for a couple of hours just talking about all the challenges they were facing. And we had their head of website there and their head of customer engagement and satisfaction and somebody who was working on the new app offering and everyone around the table was sharing from their various point of view in the business what needed to happen. And sort of the answer came from all of those discussions that if we get a really strong branding job done here and some really strong brand communications, it will help everyone. So we, we, the agency wrote the official written brief from that conversation. We just wrote a one pager that said the challenge is people don't have any kind of, they're not thinking of the entertainer when they need to buy a toy. So our brief is get more people whenever they need to buy a toy to think of the entertainer. And they had done some really interesting audience segmentation work to see their types of customers. So there's the parents who are doing a kind of spontaneous on the day small treat for a kid who's being dragged around the shops and is behaving well right through to something like a grandparent or a godparent who's doing an occasional one off, more expensive item for a birthday present or something like that. And we said actually rather than choosing which of these segmented groups to go after, let's just try and build that association between think toys, think entertainer. So that was essentially, that was our brief to ourselves.
- [13:28]
Fergus O'Carroll
Now did that come out of the multi hour immersion, we'll say with the client on that day or was there some reflection on that afterwards that led to what you just mentioned, particularly the, particularly in terms of not falling into a potential trap of chasing a segment?
- [13:46]
Catherine Willoughby
I would say it came from the reflection. You know, when you're in those kind of discussions with so much going on and everything feels really important at the time and everyone who. It took us to take a step back, we didn't have long but probably a day to think about what we'd said and I always like to write down on a massive piece of paper all the things that feel important and then gradually either combine them or connect them and end up in the end circling what is the key thing here.
- [14:16]
Fergus O'Carroll
So obviously there was no time to go out and do primary research. So how did you sort of get to this unlock that you. That you sort of built the campaign around?
- [14:26]
Catherine Willoughby
We did a little bit of primary research. So what we could do in the scrappy time frame of going to have a look around the store ourselves, seeing what it's like there and talking to anyone we knew who'd been there. So for example, I spoke to my own parents because my. We had an entertainer on the high street in the town my parents live in. So when I was growing up, my mum would shop there and my mum said to me, the thing about going into the entertainer is you can ask the staff for help and they're really knowledgeable about what toy a child might need at the age you need to buy for. So that actually led us to one of our insights was the expertise of the staff could be your angle, which you don't get from say an Amazon. We also got some of our insights were from that client kickoff discussion where we asked them what is special about the. The company that you work for. And one of them I think could have been the head of Digital guy said, well, all of us work in a toy shop, so we're kind of like big kids. Like what we tell our families we work for a toy shop. So they imagine us literally a bit, a bit like the elf character in the Will Ferrell movie.
- [15:36]
Fergus O'Carroll
Now that could have been really interesting.
- [15:38]
Catherine Willoughby
Right, so that was also one of the potential territories we put forward to them. Yeah, it was based on their staff being just really big kids. One thing we figured out from going into the store is they're really brightly l. Shelves are stacked high. So the kind of almost bombardment of bright colored things and whizzing and moving and just toys like spilling out, exploding from every angle could, could be another sort of way in where you kind of own that explosion of toys. I don't know. So. So yeah, we're just kicking a few.
- [16:14]
Fergus O'Carroll
Things around when you guys are kicking things around. And I've talked, I've talked to, I've talked to Martin and to, to others within other strategists inside Adam and Eve. You're doing that with creatives, right? I mean, is that the way you tend to work inside that it's not just you sitting alone or you sitting with another strategist, but it's, it really is, as I understand it, ideal. Ideally you would love it always to be. Maybe it's not always this way, but the way that you'd prefer and more commonly do it is with creatives, or am I wrong?
- [16:50]
Catherine Willoughby
It really varies. I think of myself as I've heard this term, I really like extroverted thinker. So I like thinking out loud and talking it through with people. And that could be another planner or a creative, especially your creative director on your account. But I usually like to have some thoughts myself before I go. So I'm not coming to that discussion empty handed. So my process would be think of as many angles or ways in as I can think of. For example, with this one, is our angle through the staff? Is it through the experience of shopping? Is it through the emotional need state of the consumer? Is it through the lens of the child themselves, you know, the eventual recipient of the product? And all of those are angles and ways in where we think what's an interesting way to frame an insight based on that angle? And then I, I probably wrote up myself about 20, 25 possible angles and then I printed them all out, one on each page, went and put them on a floor in the meeting room with Martin and Rick. So on this project it was very lean. So it was just as a creative director we had Rick, the cco. And as the plan is, it was me with Martin.
- [18:05]
Fergus O'Carroll
So what form does that take? Because I remember, because for me, when I would do that, right at a whole bunch of different directions, let's say I did it on a Monday and I would go back to it on the Tuesday and I would be like, oh shit, I really only have two because the other five feel like they're derivative of those two. And so do you have an approach where you're able to create sort of really distinct ones? Is there a discipline that you go through? Or do you also find that there's a lot of overlay, there's just some nuance, but there could be tons of richness in the nuance, but it feels nuanced.
- [18:43]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah, definitely there was overlap. And in that case you would just choose the most interesting sounding out of those ones in that bucket, let's say. So we did have though, seven independent, I'm going to say buckets of insight areas after doing that review and kind of walk around the room. And it was say, like I said, one way in was to talk about the staff and make the employees of the entertainer the. The angle, the thing that sets them apart from other toy stores. Then we probably had a few ways of framing that. Like one could be saying the toy experts or the experts, you Trust. But the most interesting one, and the one we presented to the client was 4Kids by Bigger kids. Who is a better expert on kids than kids? And we're the best.
- [19:38]
Fergus O'Carroll
That's so good.
- [19:39]
Catherine Willoughby
So there's an example of how they were of. Yeah, the same point. So we just chose the most. The most pointed or sticky one.
- [19:46]
Fergus O'Carroll
So where did that come from? Does that come from from you? Does that come from. From Rick? I mean, do you remember? I mean, that's. That's the magic of our business. That's what we do best, is bringing some sort of an emotional reaction to a really short, compelling, spiffy little line.
- [20:07]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah. I think that came from the three of us bouncing it around, to be honest, and just saying it out loud in different ways until we got some that seemed funny.
- [20:16]
Fergus O'Carroll
I love that. That's so good. So where do you. Where do you ultimately end up? You say you brought a few into the client. Did you bring seven into the client? Or it was okay. Okay. And then.
- [20:30]
Catherine Willoughby
Which is a lot. Which in itself makes for a challenging meeting.
- [20:34]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah. Why do that? Because, you know, there's some points of view, and I've heard many people say it, and I think it was. Is it dbh that used to say that? John Hegarty used to say that he only brought in one idea because bringing in more than one idea signaled that you weren't an agency of conviction. And I'm wondering why seven? Why more than one with you guys? Is it that you want to give the client choice? Is it that you don't want to assume that you know the answer? Is it that you're excited about all seven, or is it something completely different in this situation? I'm not saying that's always the way you guys do it.
- [21:13]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah, Yeah, I. I totally understand that point about conviction in this case. We didn't know these clients very well yet. We didn't know what they would be interested in or comfortable with or what was the right tone for them or even what was the right thing to focus on. So we brought that breadth very intentionally to show them the absolute extremes we could stretch to with this and. And find out what they had energy for, what they had appet. So there were really, really different things we brought in. If they'd been all quite similar and just a nuance between them, I don't think that would have been right to bring so many. But, for example, we had the thing I just explained about for kids by bigger kids right through to one that was a more purposeful statement around making Time for play. Because in our busy lives we're often these days less and less inclined to make time for the silly sort of important but important pleasures and maybe taking a more thought leadership stance.
- [22:16]
Fergus O'Carroll
Interesting.
- [22:17]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah. Or we thought, what if we make this about the gift to the parent rather than the child you're buying for? So something like not just for kids, where it would be when you buy a gift for your kid, what you're gaining is a really warm moment with them where they appreciate what you've done and you get to spend some quality time together. Totally different angle again from say a grandparent angle. We quite liked about spoiling them, just like spoil them rotten. Leaning into what we know. Quite often toy shops are thought of as or used for. So they were all so different that we felt we needed to get that spread in front of them. And then to make the meeting interesting and not feel like an endless presentation of here's another thing and another thing. For each one, we brought a piece of stimulus of some kind. Like sometimes a picture, sometimes a little a stat or a headline or some kind of thing to lead into it or on one of them. I did a little pop quiz as my stimulus and then just one page where I held up the paper that had the territory.
- [23:32]
Fergus O'Carroll
So what was the pop quiz about?
- [23:34]
Catherine Willoughby
The pop quiz was it's on a piece of paper, there's a picture of an airplane, a car, a tank engine train, a dinosaur, a fairy outfit and a baby doll. And the question is, what do these items have in common? So what do you think?
- [23:57]
Fergus O'Carroll
Oh, God, I wasn't even listening. I wasn't thinking about what exactly they were. Well, are they all toys?
- [24:04]
Catherine Willoughby
They are all toys. And specifically they're all categories of toys that children have been documented most often to develop obsessions with.
- [24:15]
Fergus O'Carroll
Love it.
- [24:16]
Catherine Willoughby
So you know how kids can get really, really into something?
- [24:20]
Fergus O'Carroll
What a great setup for that platform.
- [24:23]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes. And they know. It's like they know dinosaurs, for example, they know all the different names of all these different dinosaurs. My cousin's kid is like this at the moment. They can name dinosaurs that I've never even heard of. They can point to them and tell me which one's which. Just like they're becoming really obsessed with the thing they're into. This felt like an interesting thing for a toy shop that has a large range but also an in depth knowledge of the different toys to be potentially talking about.
- [24:51]
Fergus O'Carroll
And this is the direction you ultimately go in. Right. How did they react to it when they saw it? Not the kids, but the CMO and the CEO.
- [25:01]
Catherine Willoughby
What they instantly gravitated to on this one was that it showed an understanding of how children operate. And they thought, this is what the entertainer has always been about. We really get kids. So they liked it straight away. It appealed to them on that grounds. And the other great thing about it was it didn't feel like the brand talking about themselves, which is why they ultimately didn't go for the we're just big kids route. Because it was talking about ourselves. They preferred that it was talking about the children who this is all for. At the end of the day, how.
- [25:33]
Fergus O'Carroll
Would you describe the recommended strategic direction?
- [25:38]
Catherine Willoughby
It was the entertainer for whatever they're obsessed with.
- [25:41]
Fergus O'Carroll
Explain what that is.
- [25:43]
Catherine Willoughby
It is our proposition. So this is what went on my creative brief. And it means we know children get really full, really hard and fast and deep into the current toy or topic that they're obsessed with. And we, the entertainer, we get that too, because we also go deep and hard and with our passion into these toys that we offer and sell and also make. So we're the toy shop that really gets that about kids and can therefore really serve that need that you have as a parent.
- [26:15]
Fergus O'Carroll
So I love the way you wrote it. I'll read it out here. You wrote, kids go really charmingly deep into their obsessions and then drop them overnight. Now, as a parent, I totally get that. I can't tell you how many times that as a parent, you're just bombarded by requests to get the new thing. The new thing, the obsession, the collection of whatever that might be of dolls, of toys, of clothing or whatever. And then all of a sudden you could walk into the room and all of that stuff is strewn across the floor, it's not even played anymore, and they're onto the next thing. And you've probably spent hundreds of bucks on whatever it is that last month's obsession was. And you can't get them to go back. I mean, they are in essence abandoned toys. It's like Disney's Toy Story.
- [27:14]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah. Well, again, why that's such a relatable and heart wrenching story is because that's a proper truth that everyone, everyone recognizes.
- [27:22]
Fergus O'Carroll
You take this understanding of these obsessions that kids have and have always had, and then what do you do with that creatively? How do you then convert that into an idea? Because you could go in any number of different directions with that.
- [27:36]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah. So that became the top line of our creative brief, that kids go really charmingly deep into their obsessions, then drop them overnight. And the entertainer is the brand that really gets kids and understands this and.
- [27:50]
Fergus O'Carroll
Serves this one thing I want to do before you move on. I'm sorry to interrupt you.
- [27:53]
Catherine Willoughby
Okay.
- [27:54]
Fergus O'Carroll
I noticed when in your writing you were. You used the word charmingly, kids go really charmingly deep into their obsessions. Was that charmingly word in there deliberately to send a signal to creatives?
- [28:10]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes. Couple of reasons we know as strategists how we phrase things in it will influence how whoever's you're saying it to understands it and thinks about it. I didn't want to set this up as the type of obsession that, like.
- [28:29]
Fergus O'Carroll
Needs to be solved. Like, it's like it's a problem.
- [28:32]
Catherine Willoughby
It's a problem versus as a problem.
- [28:35]
Fergus O'Carroll
Because the flip side of the potential risk for this is that it feeds into parents feeling that they're giving too much to their kids. And it's the wasteful side of it, and it's a problem that needs to be solved versus the charming realization that I too, did that as a kid. All kids do that. That's part of growing up. And it's the charming part of that process of being a kid.
- [28:59]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah. And in fact, it's been shown to be really healthy for the kids development to get these. They're called intense childhood interests, I think by the psychological literature. And it helps their development, their brain to become interested in topic, explore it, get to the bottom of it, and then it's a sign of progress when they then move on to something new. It's like a miniature milestone of growth for the child. And also with charmingly, it can be really funny. It can just be really lovely when a child tells you. And I spoke to a few other people around the agency about it, especially parents, to see if it resonated before we presented it to the cl and they would always be volunteering. Oh, yeah. My kid is obsessed with farm yard animals at the moment. And every conversation they're just pretending to be a farm animal. And it's just really sweet stories and images that you get from it or that. My favorite one is there's a business director here at the agency who's who. I don't know how this came out, if he admitted it to me or someone else. And the word got back that he had as a child an obsession with mops, the cleaning product. Just so wonderful. The things that children can become really, really into. So we wanted all of that to come through in the creative exploration as well.
- [30:23]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah. I think back to myself growing up, and I remember I was obsessed with Action man, which Back in the day, I don't know what they call it over here in the U.S. but Action man was this little doll figurine. It's the, the little action figure. Then I was obsessed, like, then there was Action Men just lying on the ground. I was obsessed then with table tennis, then I was obsessed with snooker, I was obsessed with tennis. And I got into these obsessions. And all the time there'd be closets full of things that would be just abandoned. And you could literally track my life growing up by which closet door you opened. Yeah, it's a great. It's a great way to express it or to contextualize it. So you get to this spot, tell us about getting to the idea, maybe you can explain it. We're gonna drop it in and then we'll talk about this character. Rhea.
- [31:18]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes. So we had a few creative ways into this, but what they all hinged around was a favorite toy or a favorite type of toy. And the kind of twist or the rub in the story would be this toy no longer being the favourite kind of either by the end or what have you. Because that was the insight. The insight was they move on. Children move on. In this story, though, we start from the point of view of the already abandoned previous obsession, the previous favorite. So the really funny but kind of deadpan and straight setup of this film is that we have a toy being the main character and kind of singing of heartbreak, really, of being abandoned and left behind and singing a song which is repurposed a cover of a song that was a heartbreak breakup song. But the realization is this is a toy talking about the child who used to love him and now no longer does because they have a new my favorite obsession.
- [32:24]
Fergus O'Carroll
So describe it visually because I remember when you were on here the last time talking about boy and octopus, you did a brilliant job of describing the spot for people who can't see it and are only going to hear it. So can you describe, you can give us like a 10 second version of what people would be seeing as they're listening to this spot?
- [32:45]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes. You'll see ordinary looking house. And as we drift down the corridor of the house, the camera will land on a little scruffy monster character which is pink and orange and blue. It's kind of goofy and you can tell it's been around a bit. Its fur is kind of matted a bit dirty a bit. It's kind of been, let's say, well loved.
- [33:12]
Fergus O'Carroll
And it's a toy.
- [33:13]
Catherine Willoughby
It's a toy and it's a real Toy. So the director chose to use a combination of animatronics. So having a real toy that had moving bits in it rather than doing the whole thing in cg. And so a lot of it was live action. So it's a real toy. The toy's mouth opens and it starts to sing. And out of this toy comes a really gruff deep voice.
- [33:37]
Fergus O'Carroll
So good.
- [33:39]
Catherine Willoughby
Which is incongruent with what it looks like. Cause it's fluffy and pink and orange. And then it starts to sing this song of heartbreak. And you see the toy walking through the house and having flashbacks to the better times when the little girl did used to love him. And then we see the kind of funny, really funny punchline moment in this film is a. Well, the whole thing's funny because it's just weird and different and incongruous. But then a big shiny new monster truck, remote control monster truck comes in with the little girl driving it with the remote control and absolutely smacks our main character called Ray. And take. And he goes flying. And it's kind of like in that moment, his life flashes before his eyes and he's realizing, oh, what? How did I get here? I wake up lonely this air of silence hold me now I close my eyes and dream away.
- [34:41]
Fergus O'Carroll
Must have been.
- [34:42]
Catherine Willoughby
Love Must have been love but it's over now it must have been good but it's over now Keats.
- [34:57]
Fergus O'Carroll
So the song is Must have Been Love, But It's Over Now. It's a song by Rock zat back from, I think either the 80s or the 90s or something. So it's well known. The other thing that struck me right away, and I kind of said it in a song, sort of a throwaway thought to you. When we talked about this, the voice belongs to the son of Ian Durie. Now, people may remember Ian Durie in the Blockheads if you're from the uk. I don't think he was big over here. But back in the 70s and the 80s, Ian Durie and the Blockheads were a great band. And Ian had this really distinct voice. Now when I heard the voice of this guy, I was like, God, he sounds like Ian Durie. And you and I went back and forth and it turns out it is Ian Durie's son who is now now has his own band. And he agreed to be in your spot, right?
- [35:47]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes. He's called Baxter Durie.
- [35:50]
Fergus O'Carroll
What a great name. Baxter.
- [35:52]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah. And we knew this track was going to be important to this idea. In fact, it was part of the creative sell in for this idea was explaining how important music is in a few different capacities. There's the feeling that it evokes when you're watching the film, but there's also the extra touch points this gives you for our creative idea to stretch beyond just the film itself. For example, in audio formats, you could use the song to continue building that brand association and those memory shortcuts. So the music we knew was going to be really important also to appeal to the target audience. We were thinking about what is the type of music that they would have listened to when they were younger and that would now feel nostalgic and all wrapped up in those emotions of parenthood and thinking of what it's like to be a child and now having a child. So there was a lot of consideration that went into the music.
- [36:44]
Fergus O'Carroll
Now, one of the things that you guys are so well known for, and I think others have caught onto it too now, is like the idea of extending these campaigns and these characters beyond the piece of film itself. So my understanding is, Ray, this character in the spot was turned into a real toy that they sold in store. And there was this whole adoption certificate thing associated with.
- [37:09]
Catherine Willoughby
Yeah, this was a whole thing. So we presented the idea back in the summer, and then we went over to their headquarters to talk about what was the main character of the ad gonna be. The toy that would be singing and that Would have. Would be the abandoned character and their headquarters. It's like going into a giant toy store. They have these meeting rooms which have all toys stacked from floor to ceiling all around the edge of the room. And they gave us a kind of walking tour of all the different types of toy we could have. And we were thinking something fluffy and furry. And so we looked at all the plushie type of toys they had and decided we didn't want to use any that were already existing. We wanted to create, design something unique. So the creatives were talking about a kind of monster type thing is the most useful word I can use. But it's not monstrous, it's cute. And the first image that we all had, actually, they designed using AI image generator to get this kind of. Kind of grotesque but cute, scruffy monster toy.
- [38:25]
Fergus O'Carroll
Was it not the same toy that was in the film? And if not, why not?
- [38:28]
Catherine Willoughby
But it's really similar to the final one we ended up with. Yeah, but the. The first presentation we did where we showed our imagination of this toy, we then went to their headquarters and looked at what type of toys they could make. And we then really quickly got a brief together for Their toy factory in China and say, can you make this type of a toy? And drew an outline of what we wanted it to look like.
- [38:53]
Fergus O'Carroll
Oh, because you hadn't. You hadn't actually shot the spot yet. Is that why you weren't able to.
- [38:57]
Catherine Willoughby
Say, hey, yes, this was before we sold it.
- [38:59]
Fergus O'Carroll
Got it. Got.
- [39:00]
Catherine Willoughby
So we. We had one shot. The. The amount of time we had available was not really long enough to. For them for the factory to make a new toy and send it over to us. But we persuaded them to squeeze it in. I think they probably moved around a few things they had planned. They designed this. They created this new toy that we had designed and sent us it in the post. And then we literally went into production and filmed it.
- [39:26]
Fergus O'Carroll
Oh, that's great. So it is. The one that's in store for sale is the one or it's a lookalike to the one that you shot in the actual. The actual film.
- [39:36]
Catherine Willoughby
Yes, exactly. And then the clients had this lovely idea that because in the film you see the toy having been forgotten about. Anyone who goes into the store to buy one of these toys, which you hope there's demand for, after people see the ad and the kids want to have a toy that looks like that one on the telly, you're then like adopting this toy and giving it the new home. So it's not sad anymore that they've. That that little girl doesn't like to play with this toy because you're you or your child would. So you get lots of stuff, like you said, an adoption certificate. You get a sheet of stickers where you can stick the little ray toy. I have one of those on my laptop right now. For example. You have. They go for you a headband that you could put a kind of ray, like mask hat thing on. Loads of fun stuff that you get when you buy the toy. And it's just made it into a whole experience of acquiring this character rather than just the transactional thing of buying a toy.
- [40:33]
Fergus O'Carroll
I love that. I remember the very first time I saw this spot. I didn't really notice the tagline when I first saw the spot. And I thought it was for a store that sold used toys. And I was like, totally intrigued by that concept. But the tagline that's at the end of the spot is for the next love of their life, which is a great line. For the next love of their life and.
- [40:55]
Catherine Willoughby
Exactly. We didn't want it to seem kind of trivializing and over consumption, wasteful. You should just buy more and more and more. We didn't want to give out an irresponsible message. So the love of their life is quite important. Therefore, these are deeply loved and cherished and played with toys. They're not just disposable toys. These are toys. And you know how when you're a kid, you kind of think of the toy of having its own, a life of its own. That was also what we're trying to get across with this whole having the toy being alive and having feelings and everything like that.
- [41:27]
Fergus O'Carroll
It is Catherine Willoughby, planning director, Adam and Eve DDB in London. The client is the entertainer. It's a toy shop in the uk. Loved this conversation. Thanks again for coming on and sharing all of this great journey with us.
- [41:45]
Catherine Willoughby
Thank you very much for having me. Great to chat.
- [41:47]
Fergus O'Carroll
And we will see everyone on the next episode.