Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

Exploring developer-marketer collaborations, and the Cadbury 200 campaign

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 10

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What do you achieve when you amalgamate the talents of your marketing team with the technical prowess of your developers? Even greater opportunities for campaign success and delighting your audiences! Danica Walpole, a full-stack developer at Brew Digital, joins us to discuss the power of synergy between departments.

A beloved British chocolate brand is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, and we mull over the success of their nostalgia-driven campaign. We're joined by Sarah Tennent, Co-Creative Director of Brew Digital North, to gain an understanding of how the influence of Cadbury makes the leap across the Atlantic.

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Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

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Sarah Tennent:

We don't have flakes, we don't have curly whirlies, we you know the 99 that you guys have. Which great invention does not exist here?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Welcome to the latest episode of Marketers of the Universe. We are super excited to welcome two new guests from the wider brew team. We have Danika Walpole, who is a senior full stack web developer, who is going to give us a little bit of insight into work, development and marketing, and we also have Sarah Tennant, who is co-creative director of our brew Digital North American branch. This month we're talking about Cabri 200, and we're also going to dig into making the most of working with web developers.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

As usual, we'll try our best to pick out a couple of takeaways that you can go and implement into your marketing strategy. Make sure to reach out to us if you do have any burning topics you want us to discuss. So let's get on with the podcast. Our first topic today is looking at how marketers can collaborate with web developers to maximize their digital marketing opportunities, and we're really lucky today to have Danika Walpole joining us from our web development team, and alongside Danika we have Mark Bundle, who is our senior email marketing manager, also in charge of everything to do with with CRM, and we have Kieran O'Neill as well joining us to add into the conversation as well. From an account management point of view, what aspects of development, have the ability to impact digital marketers and digital marketing.

Danica Walpole:

Good question. The long and short answer is pretty much all of it. When you're looking at the genesis at the site, when we're talking about design and UX, all of these things have the ability to impact SEO and digital marketing in general. If you're thinking about how easy it is for your site to use, that pays an integral part in how not only users navigate your site and whether they return, or how Google draws your site and boosts its ranking SEO wise. We also look at things like loading speed and responsiveness, and also like analytics and security. Nowadays, those are all integral parts of making sure that your site can rank as best as it can with the numerous Google algorithms that they push out there.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

And slipping this to both Kieran and Mark. From a marketers point of view, what do we want to see more from developers? How do we work better with developers?

Ross Stratton:

To be honest with you, it's just getting their honest thoughts on, I guess, the nonsense that we marketers or ex-marketeers come up with. I mean, jokes aside, I mean it's an open dialogue between your dev team and marketing. It's vital helps ensure that you're getting the most out of your platforms and websites. I'd want their input on our digital roadmap to ensure you know, for one thing, that's realistic and that they're also prepped for scheduling time to work on the updates that we're giving them.

Mark Bundle:

Well, kieran said that is probably the main thing is the communication there's so often are.

Mark Bundle:

The developers are here doing their thing, the marketers are here doing their thing and they could be doing something together but aren't necessarily talking as much as they need to be, and I think that's pretty common across a lot of companies because the two disciplines don't naturally interact on a day-to-day basis.

Mark Bundle:

Maybe other things communicate, but it's a shame we've not got Jason here today, who's our SEO expert, because obviously an awful lot of it comes down to kind of SEO and, like you were saying, optimizations and things. But it's as well as talking about tagging and making sure the right cookie policies and the cookie balance and things are going to work, making sure that sign up boxes for newsletters are in place, and this is. There's so much cool stuff that they've can do with the site that marketers want, but it's just remembering to ask, like I think both sides probably a little bit, especially the marketing side of how my hands up to this one myself we're a little bit guilty of just assuming oh yeah, of course everyone knows to do that and maybe that needing to actually ask for things and kind of communicate what you want is lacking.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Cheers guys. How can we work better as marketers and developers together, and what are we missing out on by not doing this?

Danica Walpole:

We all need a campfire. I need to get round and sink in by our together Because, from the developer perspective, we crave that communication early on and the challenges we have is that we have these great ideas from the market is which are in the back of our minds and there are considerations that we want to make, but we also have to balance design choices and stuff that maybe also been made by marketers. But if you communicate those things early on with us, we can make sure that that's informing every choice we make in terms of our build, in terms of the CMS we pick, and things like cookie banners, cookie policies and overall just creating a greater experience, not for our end user only, but also marketers that may occasionally be using our CMS or they want to add new things into that.

Ross Stratton:

We're all talking about the same thing here, which is just more collaboration, more communication. I'm just remembering the lyrics to come by our right now. But yeah, I mean it's around table. Share knowledge, share your strategy, share your ideals. Discuss the platforms we want to achieve. Understand what's possible, what can be faced in, listen to how the devs feel about certain ideas.

Ross Stratton:

Is it worth adding X to this website or this email if it makes the design of that an absolute pain in the backside? I think the other thing is processes. Teams within the same company will have slightly different processes. You've got to respect that too and respect what they're to do. Looks like I found when I worked in marketing is that the challenge I had. I would occasionally get very wraps up in what strategy and campaign I was working on, that I would railroad discussions. The dev team might actually love jumping on a landing page takeover, but if they've scheduled in, for instance, like a week of site speed optimization, you kind of want to work with them to understand when is the best time to launch, rather than being like, oh, we've come up with this with the commercial team and this is what we need to be done, and then your dev, your dev teams going. We've got no time to do that, so basically plan together.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I've seen it before where and I think this, this campfire come by our conversation is really important because I've been part of teams where Dev doesn't get the appreciation they deserve and you have Mark's is just growing. We want this, we want this, we want this, we want this and suddenly the website is getting really heavy. And because there's no two way conversation, mark's is complaining that their website sign running quickly, but not realizing the reason their website sign running quickly is because they want all of the extra things that they're chucking and chucking and chucking.

Mark Bundle:

It's not just about the communication is the planning stage, because that says there's going to all the clever things that we want but we don't. But we don't necessarily think to have that communication to lay down the pipeline and think a lot of people are like, oh, we're doing X projects and we need to do the thing to make it work. What I don't do is schedule properly. Let the planning so the scheduling is like all this is what our team needs to do, not this is how we need to allow time for other teams as well. I think, just being considerate, like I said, other people's timelines, other people's day jobs, we got to make sure there's the time and space to do that as well.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That is such an important thing and there is an argument and I kind of want to hear people's opinions on this. Actually, as an agency, sometimes we're brought in Late stage and you can not always have the best understanding of a project. Imagine that's the same. If you're being brought in a late stage from a dev point of view, how do we make sure that we are being more?

Danica Walpole:

collaborative. The first thing that comes to mind is the words of vanilla ice collaborate and listen. Because I think, especially from a dev perspective, when sometimes we are brought in later, there can be times and things that we say no to or like this isn't a good idea Because of the sort of maybe connotations around. There is just sort of being a bit tunnel vision and getting on with things that can come as a bit of a shock. But especially at Brewee, we never say no or hold up. We're not sure that's a good idea without good reason.

Danica Walpole:

It's that appreciation that we're all seeing very different pieces of the puzzle, whereas you could have something, you know, maybe a month down the line we're like, oh, our performance is tanked. And I'm like, yeah, that's because you wanted to. This really image heavy graphic on your site that loads in Excellent amount of times and blah, blah. There are things that we can do to improve the performance of that code. Wise, but it's it's those choices and the reasoning why we're saying no and trusting that we're not just being grumbly little gremlins.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I want to just look at an example of where being more collaborative has delivered quality results, and I'm actually going to go straight back to you, danica, if you've got an example of where you've seen a really positive working relationship between marketers and web depth.

Danica Walpole:

Yes, definitely so. Actually with our monoroo post sites we work with Jason, and that was around the implementation of a field in our CMS called the schema markup.

Danica Walpole:

And how's users off the CMS whether you know these are directly markets is pushing it in all. They've been informed from another team that they need to put in this schema markup. They can literally have a dedicated field where they know that they need to put in something that Google can recognize and so validate the presence of the site. So that's been a really great thing where it takes away that individual step of the maybe people coming to us and be on, you pop this in or he put this in our you know our head of tag and stuff like that. It's actually built in, so there's no reason for it to actually be forgotten or not considered. It's going to be on every page that you build up the site and just making sure it's there and it's prominent and it needs to be filled in amazing thank you, hearing mark any, for example, as you've had.

Mark Bundle:

There was a client looking to rebuild basically their entire website. It was originally planned as a marketing project to their side. We were going to support them and it was kind of the idea to get the devs in earlier. Turned out, a lot of the designs that the internal marketers come up with, very pretty Not functional, on the platform that was there was been used for their website. If they've done that, they need to complete re platform, which obviously is not practical, not quick and very expensive. Getting the expertise in early. Actually, men that it is a awful lot of time and effort and awful money, because it's what he's was deployed at the right time my.

Ross Stratton:

My next example is it's pretty much could be the same thing. I had a conversation with Not just the development team was the design team. I was heading up some photo shoots for travel company and actually sat down and just went right with the session, work out the ratio, the sizes of the images that end up going on to the website. What are the crops basically was able to do when I was talking to the lifestyle photographer Is tell him to just step back a touch. You know, don't go in so tight. You want the people actually almost framing the picture rather than being center of the picture.

Ross Stratton:

So taking Separate shots, one which is for big billboard or posters or that kind of thing where it's just it's a big image, and then take another one which allowed a space to put Messaging banners, cta is that kind of thing. So it meant that from the ground up, the site look more Organic, more natural. We were shoe horning marketing messages in it all just fit. What it meant was was that in terms of time resource, we we gained so much, and doing it because it became much easier to build the crave that we needed.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

The dev team were also a lot happier because they weren't having to Mess around with any, any images that weren't very, you know what optimize, for instance, coming from the design team just by engaging the web dev team early, you were able to take that information feed to the photographer, which in most situations would happen either way before or without any consideration of the developer, which is amazing.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

But I think one thing that's kind of struck me as we've been talking is just for a strategy point of view and this is something that I know that we try to do when we kind of bring on new clients is have someone in the room from development, have someone in the room from design, have someone in the room from sales, because all those two perspectives everyone has different priorities and, as with Kearans example, there are. There is a chain reaction that can change how you do things. I am going to wrap this conversation up just by asking is there any examples or any tips that you think marketers can Use or take away to make sure that they're bringing out the creative side of development as well? That Definitely.

Danica Walpole:

I think the first sort of call to action in my mind is set up a meeting with some of your key developers or people who are working on a specific product. Having something regularly in the calendar is a great way to one get an insight into what they're doing, what they're working on whether it's related to your product or project at the time but also opening up that conversation and that relationship around the things that are key for you and so that they always have that at the front of their mind, because I think a lot of these things. You can have initial conversations and then conversations at the end during a retrospective, but if you're constantly in communication on a weekly basis, you can see how you can both cross something great together. What is your second topic today?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Cool. Our second topic today, where we have our second special guest, sarah Tellen, is joining us from our North American team. We have Danica returning to chat and we also have Ross Stratton, who is a paid media manager in our digital marketing team. But the topic that we're looking at today Cadbury 200, we are going to break down that campaign, understand what we liked, what we didn't like, just sort of on a service level initially, and then see if we can pick out a few things that our listeners could potentially take away and learn from how this campaign has been delivered and particularly what B2B companies can learn from a huge brand like Cadbury running a campaign like this. I just want your opinion initially on the Cadbury 200 campaign and maybe a little bit of backgrounds. Who's going to give me a bit of background to Cadbury 200?

Sarah Tennent:

That was one of the first things that I thought of was like maybe bringing in a bit of background in case people don't know exactly what we're talking about. So just like a bit of overview. The original ad campaign was Mums' Birthday and that was a video campaign that took place in modern day. So they've remade that Mums' Birthday campaign into Birthday, which shares the same structure as the original ad. It even utilizes the same actors, but it plays out in the course of 200 years to kind of show the evolution of Cadbury over the years.

Sarah Tennent:

The campaign's very UK based. The actors in the campaigns obviously have UK accents. The surrounding areas, any kind of environmental hints, are all very UK embedded. How does it learn from Canada? Honestly, I think the biggest difference is that the campaign didn't even really make its way to Canada. So you think, oh, cadbury, it's worldwide, everyone knows about it. Obviously, this campaign is going to be a global campaign.

Sarah Tennent:

I would have loved that, but I don't even really think the campaign made its way to Canada. I don't remember seeing anything organically in terms of digital content, print content, anything like that. I don't think that that's the worst thing. Now hear me out. I love Cadbury. I don't think it's the worst thing, because Cadbury in Canada does not hold the same value that I think Cadbury holds in the UK. So here in Canada it's a different taste, tastes completely different, different in availability, in brands. So we don't have flakes, we don't have curly warlies, we the 99 that you guys have, which great invention does not exist here. So I think there's a different story to Cadbury in Canada versus the UK and I'm not sure that that campaign in the UK versus Canada, I don't think the campaign in Canada would have held the same kind of emotional value as it does in the UK.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

It's a good example of how we can't just copy and paste things from one geography to another. I'm interested now just to hear perspective from Danica and Ross. How have you found this landed in the UK? You know, beyond the research that you've done for the podcast, have you seen much of this campaign?

Danica Walpole:

Yeah, I've. You know I occasionally step away from Netflix and watch normal television, so I've seen the TV adverts and stuff like that and I personally absolutely love it. I think, paired with the television campaign and the saps that you can go and buy in a nostalgic packaging Chocolate bars to me my brain is just buzzing. I love old packaging and I think the earliest one I remember is the 2003 one of the white swoosh and the prominent poor, Although I do know that from the television campaign some people missed the point, because there's a moment where a person goes into the shop and then when they come out their costuming has changed and some people didn't quite tweak that. It was showing different periods of time, so they're like that's really slapdash, that's a different costume to what they're wearing in the shops. I think in some places it's a lot more nuanced in terms of what they're trying to portray. But I think generally the idea of the evolution throughout the ages of the chocolate and people's relationship with it is really cool.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I know. The one thing that I've quite liked is the fact that it's multi-platform. I've seen it on digital channels, I've seen it on TV, but I've also seen it plastered on the aisle in St Greece. Other supermarkets are available, ross.

Ross Stratton:

Yeah, I mean I'm a sucker for any sort of ad that successfully tugs on my heartstrings. I think a lot of brands try it. It doesn't always land. But yeah, this is definitely something that resonated with me. I think kind of the overall message was something around kind of, even though so much has changed over the last two 300 years, these kind of little generous acts could have played out in any year and they're timeless, which I think is a really nice kind of centerpiece to the ad. And also I think it's quite nice the Cadbury Bar isn't really the centerpiece of the story, it's just kind of almost an afterthought. It's more the acts of giving it which is kind of resonates with everyone.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

It's easy to look at these big campaigns that are done by Cadbury. So I remember one that Coca-Cola did where they sent you a poke bottle with your name on it and everyone loved that and you'd keep these things for ages and you'd never drink it. Is there any point in looking at these things if you're a kind of small brand that doesn't sell chocolate or fast moving consumer goods? Maybe you're a small tech company? Maybe, I know, you're selling umbrellas.

Sarah Tennent:

Oh, absolutely. I think anyone can take anything from this campaign, regardless of your industry, your sector, your if you're B2B, b2c the size of your company. Because I think when you actually break down the campaign, it comes more about aligning the campaign with the brand's core values. You know, the campaign became a powerful strategy to connect with consumers on a deeper level by utilizing things like nostalgia, emotional intelligence, really playing off the brand's values. And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that companies make when they're coming up with creative strategy is that they think that the strategy has to be so obvious that they don't trust the audience's intelligence.

Sarah Tennent:

So sometimes in marketing you'll hear the line like well, people are generally stupid, you have to spell it out for them, you have to hand it to them on a silver platter. And I think if that's your perspective on marketing, you probably shouldn't be in marketing. I think that you really have to trust that the audience has an intelligence, the audience has an emotional intelligence and use that to your ability, which I think is what this campaign did so well. You almost want to watch the ad twice just to catch the time hop, because it's such a subtle delight and the fact that the bar is not the main character in this. It leaves the audience thinking what did I just watch? What was the goal of that? What was that about? How do I feel? And I think that that is the biggest lesson to be learned is that you need to trust your audience's intelligence.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I really liked your mentioning of emotional intelligence there, because it's something that we discuss quite regularly on the podcast. Is that kind of importance of emotion and triggering people's emotion, and I guess if you can create something that triggers emotion in someone, they are naturally going to be more aligned with your brands and therefore, hopefully your product as well.

Danica Walpole:

The main crux of it is that interpersonal relationship. I think that's one of the great things that we have at Brew in terms of our values and clients that we take on is that we do develop that sense of you know us, we know you, and that is what informs our relationship and gets a great overall product. And I think that's what Cadry has captured in this. It's taken away the product in some sense and it's focused on the relationship. And if you can put that into a marketing campaign where people can really understand and get a feel for what you value and what you're about, then they are more inclined to work with you because they feel like they know you.

Ross Stratton:

I think one aspect we haven't really talked about is there was actually a set of out of the home ads that kind of went alongside the main center base, which was crowdsourced images which featured real photographs submitted by the British public showing different ways Cadry's chocolates that featured in their lives, which I think kind of gives a certain amount of authenticity to the campaign and kind of gives people the idea that can get involved. I think there's a lesson to be learned there around kind of having a coherent brand message that feeds into what we're marketing. I just thought that was a pretty nice touch and something people can draw some.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Yeah, justin, I hadn't even thought of that. But something you can really think about with whatever product you've got, is how does your audience use it, how do they get excited about it? And if you can capture that excitement, then it's going to be a lot more authentic than saying, the best chocolate bar, the world's most popular chocolate bar, which is a way they could have gone with this, the longest surviving chocolate brand in the world. I don't know if that's true, but this hits differently, right.

Sarah Tennent:

Yeah, that's why I'm kind of disappointed that they didn't get the campaign over to Canada, because, while I think it holds different value in the UK versus Canada, I think on a personal level, like I'm first generation Canadian and my dad is from Glasgow, scotland, so we still hold that kind of Cadbury story in our household. So my parents will gift me a one kilogram gigantic imported dairy milk chocolate bar for Christmas every single year since I was like seven. So all of those pictures that I saw with the ads of user submitted photos, the nostalgic kids opening things on their birthday or mums opening something on Mother's Day I was like, hey, we have that in our Canadian household. There's photos of me opening this chocolate bar every Christmas morning. Some a little disappointed they didn't bring the story over to Canada. I still think it would have been great for them to globalize the campaign a little bit more, but I can understand in the theme of authenticity why they did not, just because it holds a bit of different value here.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Just to wrap ourselves up now. What is one thing that an audience can take away from this campaign? And I'm going to start with Danica.

Danica Walpole:

I think. Yet what Ross touched on the authenticity and also just capturing real life relationships is just a great thing that any brand can take from in terms of how they apply this in their future campaigns.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Amazing Sarah.

Sarah Tennent:

Yeah, I think I'm touching on kind of what we talked about before with the impact of creative strategy and being able to trust your audience to understand the creative strategy. I think that that is a big one. I think the other thing that they did super well was bringing the campaign across all channels, like they did hit digital print, you know, user submitted photos, so which, going back to that, like user generated content, I think all of that was really awesome. They've been created like posters I think it was a series of six that looked like ads of, like limited edition packs in store today. So they had all of these different posters and things like that and I think just bringing your campaign to a full channel marketing solution is really the way to go, while trusting your audience's emotional intelligence to be able to understand and reflect and connect with that campaign.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Amazing and Ross, can you wrap us up please?

Ross Stratton:

Wow, such good answers from both Mine is going to be an alien comparison. I think what may take away from me is just kind of make your content if not nostalgic then at least relatable. I think that's the best way to kind of resonate with your audience for a B2B kind of market that might be drilling down into particular pain points that they've seen or that need to be solved, and that's the best way to kind of drive engagement and conversion with your ads.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Brilliant, and I'm going to wrap up as well. Cast your mind back to the weird Kremeg adverts. I couldn't even tell you when they were. There's a bloke dipping a chip into a Kremeg. We said earlier about how we have to consider that users or audience do have some kind of emotional intelligence. But let's be honest, sometimes they're a bit weird. Sometimes, reaching out to your audience, having those conversations with your audience and finding actually, this person uses your product or service in a completely wacky, wrong, horrible way, that's a cool story. So maybe that's something you should look at when you're approaching campaigns and new campaigns.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That is all we have time for today. Thank you everyone for listening in. Hopefully there's been a few bits of useful information in there and that there's something that you can go away Implement your own marketing strategy, implement your processes and hopefully help you be a better marketer. And we love that you listen to this podcast. We love making this content and we really love it. If you could recommend the show to one friend that you think would enjoy listening. If that's a colleague, an ex-colleague, share it on LinkedIn We'll appreciate it. And thank you in particular to the British team for their research and input into today's session. Do go and check out past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you listen to your podcasts on, and we will see you on the next one. I've been Hayden and these guys are the marketers of the universe.