Turning the Table with Wunder’s Creative Director

Mike Postma, Creative Director at the esteemed Halifax agency Wunder, Gold winner of Strategy Small Agency of the Year, takes us behind the scenes at creating the campaign Timestamps for client NSCDA.

Be honest for a moment, what young person wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to work as a CCDP for the NSCDA? Wait, a who and what now? A CCDP, or Certified Career Development Professional. It’s a job where you get to help other people find meaningful careers. It’s purpose-driven work with a ton of other benefits you wouldn't get at your typical entry-level job.

It’s an exciting opportunity that aligns with all the values our younger audience holds dear, but unfortunately requires a long-winded explanation they’re not going to listen to. So, to stop our binge-watching audience in their tracks, we turned over 20 of their favourite TV shows into covert ads about becoming a CCDP.

What were some unique features of the campaign?

The career development industry can seem like a fairly complex and confusing industry, but we realized that if we can link our messaging to things our audience is already interested in, we can drastically reduce the barrier to getting their attention and educating them through simple terms.

So we combed through over 100 hours of the most popular TV series to pinpoint the exact scenes that aligned with a career as a CCDP. Then, using a familiar timestamp format that frequently makes its way into yearbook quotes and comment sections on social, we sent people on a quick hunt for a satisfying payoff. This approach turned passive ad consumption into an interactive experience, making our message far more impactful and memorable.

Can you give us some "peeks" behind the scenes?

Finding the timestamps was a task that initially seemed perfect for artificial intelligence, but ultimately required a more complex manual approach. As it turns out, the AI chatbots only have a high-level knowledge of shows and can’t pinpoint any actual scenes or dialogue. In fact, in an attempt to hide their own ineptitude, they actually end up making up scenes and episode titles that don’t even exist (phew, our jobs are safe for now).

So once we established a list of popular streaming series, we proceeded to scrub through the various episodes to find relevant scenes that we could use to demonstrate reasons why a career as a CCDP is a great option. But faced with many shows and hundreds of hours of content, we quickly realized we needed better methods that allowed us to arrive at useful timestamps quicker.

Luckily, most popular shows have a lot of fan created content and websites that highlight a bunch of quotes from various episodes. From there we were able to scan each of these listicles to see if there were any scenes that could align with the messaging we wanted to communicate. And then once we had quotes, we took those and searched for the season/episode they were mentioned in. Reducing our search time and allowing us to hone in on specific episodes and themes rather than scrubbing every single episode one by one. Ultimately this process resulted in over 20 unique timestamps and ad placements.

Why is this particular project a fave?

It’s always fun when a concept can turn such a traditional media placement as a simple transit shelter ad into something new and exciting that people can immediately interact with. It’s also extremely rare that you get to hijack such a broad section of pop culture and elegantly ride its coattails to shamelessly promote your client’s offerings. I say shameless because we’re very much marrying creativity with purpose on this one. We’re not just selling another product, but we’re highlighting a meaningful career path that helps others find their purpose to help others. Very meta, I know, but advertising a great cause you can fully stand behind does make a project that much more enjoyable to work on.

Can you give us your opinion on what you think made this project a success?

I think there is an authenticity in our approach that shines through. It would’ve been all too easy to end up lecturing young people, but instead, we were able to connect with them on their terms, using their favourite shows to shine a light on a fulfilling career opportunity. By putting in the work to collect the timestamps from the shows people are already interested in, we gave ourselves a huge edge over a typical out-of-home ad and made a meaningful connection with our audience.

And with the bulk of the ads placed on transit shelters near schools and campuses, where people have nothing but time (and their phones), we made it extremely hard for them to not engage with our ads — or at the very least take a picture for later. Flip through them yourself, you’ll have a pretty hard time not wondering what’s on the other end of each timestamp.

Connect with Wunder:
W. wunder.ca
IG: @wunderinc
IN: @wunderinc | @mikepostma

Clever well-executed advertising is a show-stopper and inevitably produces action from the viewer. Team Wunder, well done!