Pete Hotchkiss, Partner, Substance

(Periodically, we will post interviews with prominent creative and media executives who are instrumental in bringing breakthrough advertising ideas to the Web.)

 

My perfect working day: “I’m actually an early riser - I like to get into the office early to get on top of emails.  We work in the States as well as London, so things come in during the night - and it helps to get the emails out of the way.  That way, I can prepare the schedules for the creative guys, put briefing materials together where necessary and get up to speed on what is happening in the market.

I catch up on my Google reader and all of my blogs - industry focused, iFilm, and those related to the wider sphere of digital creativity.”

My muse best comes when… 

“Sometimes an idea can come in the middle of a brainstorming session or on the tube when my nose is packed into someone’s armpit…  You can’t force it…  The most important thing is to be in a creative environment.  No magic formula.”

My favorite brand experience:

“My favorite campaign recently has got to be Jumper - the movie.  There were some really great materials created for MSN by an Australian agency which used a lot of video compositing.  We ran sync ads with specifically-shot green screen footage - very high impact.  We had characters jumping from format to format - breaking up the page into different units and then dancing around and jumping up to the Leaderboard, creating synchronization and synergy.  We tried to achieve high impact.  The goal wasn’t necessarily high click-through - it was about engagement and exposure and the title that we were trying to push. 

The users loved it.  Interaction rate across the campaign was 85-88% - we saw the time they were exposed to those expandable units - and how many watched through to the end.  That is as valuable to us as a click-through.   The campaign was unique because we had specific chrome-key footage.  There were a couple hours of footage, so we were able to use it and repackage it, compress it down into a set of assets that could be delivered within a reasonable size.  We could deliver something that was really engaging. 

Big campaign, big spend.  Lots of media everywhere.    It was the nature of the content and the impact that we could deliver.  It drove home the message and underpinned the brand.  If you try to use a technique or tool that isn’t related to the message, you’re just diluting your tool.  So we waited to use these types of formats until we had the right content for the tools.”