Wavemaker’s Symbiotic Relationship between Content and Innovation

LBB’s Addison Capper chatted with them at Cannes Lions to find out more. 

Sarah> The difference in how we talk about innovation at Wavemaker is that, to us, it’s 'applied innovation'. That means that everything we do has an application, so we effectively learn innovation by doing it. We run a lot of pilots, a lot of experiments, and we look to Adam and his brilliant team to help us scale some of those and build out what those look like. 

Adam> There isn't a media plan in 2023 that doesn't have content in it. It's our job to make sure that it is maximised as effectively, efficiently and creatively as possible. Now, more and more, we're seeing that innovation is leading the way for us to build it out. The work that I and my team do is better when Sarah and her team are involved. If I get a brief, whether big or small, 99 times out of 100 I'm going to run it by Sarah to tell her what we're thinking about and ask how we can make it better. Clients are often excited, interested or enthusiastic about trying something that has never been done before and it's on us to figure out how we add applied innovation to the programme as to how it manifests itself in media.

Adam> Brand-funded entertainment can manifest itself on platforms, in partnerships, in intellectual property and branding. More and more, brands want to own the story that they're going to tell and create culture as opposed to just sitting adjacent to it. You could show up on a morning show with advertisements or an integration - or you can create a show that tells the same story, but you own it and by working with Wavemaker, we'll do everything we can to guarantee distribution. There's no risk of the tree falling in the forest because as a media agency, we have to have a distribution plan before we start filming.

Sarah> Innovation fuels our process. From insight to strategy to creation to prototyping, we now work alongside AI tools and incredible innovations that help us sculpt what that innovation begins to look like. That's really, really important, and something that our clients are doing more and more. Adam and I work together to ensure that every content plan that Adam's putting forward includes something new, that's never been done before, is super provocative, and gets our client thinking really differently. That's been a really successful approach for us in order to begin scaling that innovation.

Adam> There's a tonne [of content], but we try to look at the values of the brand and look around to see what else has those values, whether it be another brand, celebrity talent, a production partner or a storyteller that can be a part of it, and then we'll produce it in a way that is relevant and resonant to the audiences we're speaking to. When we do that, it has transcended. We just produced a documentary called 'Embodied' for Novo Nordisk. It's a beautiful story about people who are struggling with obesity. The objective is to change the narrative around obesity in the world and in just telling a beautiful story that resonated with the audience, it was recognised as an official selection of Tribeca. We premiered it at the film festival recently and it works. If the brand's values are worthy of telling an interesting story, and we can find the right authentic partner to share that story, it will cut through and it has every single time.

Sarah> Our Cannes Lions Titanium that we won last year with generative AI is a really good example of that. It's personalisation at scale. We also did another big project this year with Pernod Ricard where we got three of the biggest film stars in India and essentially created a synthesised voice and synthesised human, where you could send personalised greeting messages to friends and family. It's really, really interesting in terms of scaling content in how you make it more personable and how we can leverage some of those technologies to begin machine learning and look at how we can make it super, super relevant to each individual person. 

At Wavemaker we've got five centres of excellence [in AI], one of which is specifically around conversational AI. We just launched an incredible project with the Royal Navy. The brief for that project was quite broad: how do we improve diversity in our recruitment process? If we think about all of the media solutions that we would typically go to for that type of brief, we wanted to push it further, so we looked at AI as a solution. We created six diverse avatars and a conversational experience that would take people on the 12-month recruitment journey. Adam and I are going to work together to look at how we take that even further and build out that content evolution even further.

Adam> You lead with the audience. The first questions we ask when we get a brief is, where's the audience and what are they consuming? The work we do is designed to make the media plan innovative, effective and efficient. So we need to know how the audience is consuming media and what they're consuming, so that when we create it, it lives authentically wherever they already are, as opposed to creating something and pushing it to them. 

Sarah> We spend a lot of time looking at creators and the way that they show up on platforms, and they are some of the best innovators going. A great example is MrBeast's ‘Squid Game’ - more people saw that than the actual ‘Squid Game’ series on Netflix. He brought his entire audience along the journey with him with huge incentivisation and innovation. We look really, really closely at that and how we take our audience on that journey. We work with partners like TikTok to look at how we can actually co-create something brilliant.  

Sarah> Gaming is a huge place where content and innovation come together. We are doing some incredible innovation work in the gaming space. We've just launched a mobile world-first for L'Oreal on Sims Mobile and we're finding what that white space is. We talked about conversational AI and content in gaming - we're going to be placing these things into games, and we're going to be having those conversations in-game. It's already happening but I think gaming next year will be huge.