Meet The Shortlisters: Litbaits

By Brett McKenzie on Mar 12, 2018

Dieste CCO Ciro Sarmiento speaks about clickbait-inspired shortlisted campaign


The Call for Entries period of The One Show 2018 is over, and now our team shifts towards preparing for final judging. And while most agencies scrambled through to the bitter end to get their entries ready, some took advantage of our quarterly entry periods to submit their work much earlier in the year. These entries have already gone through preliminary rounds of judging, with the top scoring entries making the shortlist, moving directly to the final round next month.

Ahead of the final round of judging, we are highlighting some of the shortlisted work, focusing on the smaller agencies on the playing field. Our final shortlisted entry in the spotlight is "Litbaits" by Dallas' Dieste for local bookstore The Wild Detectiveswhich was shortlisted in the Interactive category. We chatted with Dieste Chief Creative Officer Ciro Sarmiento about taking advantage of a clickbait-prone socirty, and how small clients are often the bravest.



How did this particular project with The Wild Detectives come about?

Ciro: It started with a side project of one of our former creative directors, Raúl Méndez. Believe it or not, Donald Trump was the catalyst for this campaign. Clickbait has been around for quite some time but it seemed like when Trump came into the limelight, clickbait became even more pervasive. A lot of clickbaity articles that would end in disappointment, yet people could not stop clicking. That was the inspiration for Litbaits that the complete team then wrote, crafted and had ready for our Wild Detectives client. We made a positive twist and tricked people into reading better content on Facebook — classic literature.

TL;DR is a popular acronym these days. In an age when people are said to have reduced attention spans, wouldn’t it be counterproductive to mix social media with entire novels?

TL;DR is only TL when there's nothing interesting behind the video or written piece. But I don't think there's such a thing as too long content, there's only too boring. People like to be surprised and trolled, when it's in good fun of course.

Quite often things change from the original idea to the final execution. Did you have any serendipitous moments along the way?

We were pretty clear on what we wanted to do and what we needed to achieve. We did tweak and tune the images and headlines to reflect more current subjects or themes but the framework for the idea remained pretty much the same since Day 1. There was a lot of work, tons of click bait titles to choose from. We edited and curated the best ones.

Is there anything you’d change or tweak if you had just a little more time?

Litbaits was done in about a month, from initial idea to live execution. I think any more time than that and we would have started second guessing too much or waste too much time trying to get it to be completely perfect. 

What’s the secret to a great social media campaign for a small client?

Ironically, boldness. That’s why small brands are loved and big brands are trolled. Small clients allow you to grow with them, they really go for it and are not as afraid to make bold moves. There’s an aspect to brands in social media that some don’t get and it is the acid test of social media audiences. Any single comment or post is a potential PR nightmare and big brands are scared as shit of that. The thing is, you have to be ok with it, you can’t make everybody happy. A brand should have its own point of view and personality. If you are not liked by one person — as in life — you are still going to sleep at night. 

"There’s an aspect to brands in social media that some don’t get and it is the acid test of social media audiences. Any single comment or post is a potential PR nightmare and big brands are scared as shit of that."

Now has the campaign worked... on your creative team? Is the Dieste staff now picking up Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights on their lunch hours? What’s your favorite classic novel?

Well, more than getting employees to read Moby Dick it did something better: it got them to check out The Wild Detectives Bookstore!

My favorite classic novel? I'd have to say Robinson Crusoe and Gabriel García Márquez’ work. I know Raúl likes Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Marina Cuesta (Creative Director) she likes Neruda and Matías Jaramillo, our Digital Director, likes Journey to the End of the Night, and our head of art Zeta Zapata likes 1984. It’s a very diverse team.

What’s next for Dieste? What new work should the world be keeping an eye out for? After all, as this year’s campaign says, if you win you’ll become “famous famous”!

We are working on a few new surprises for Wild Detectives, AT&T and other brands we always feel passionate about. Recently, we officially launched a big platform to help shelter dogs get adopted, by using curated musical tastes on Spotify. We’ve been creating hundreds of playlists for more than a year. You can search “Dallas Pets Alive” on Spotify and check it out.

The “Spotiplay” campaign comes with a beautifully crafted film called JAM. Here’s an article about it:

 


The final rounds of judging for both The One Show 2018 and the ADC 97th Annual Awards begin in mid-March, but it's not too early to think about securing tickets for the respective award shows, which will take place during Creative Week this May 7–11


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