When you’re trying to get a new concept or campaign off the ground, there’s nothing worse than the person who sits back pricking holes in your ideas while you’re trying to float them.
There is a way to use that Negative Nellie or Nigel for the good of the company – put them on the Red Team!
The concept of Red Team/Blue Team has been used in military strategizing for a long time and, like so many warlike terms, has also been incorporated into cybersecurity practice. Don’t be put off by this, it also has enormous potential to improve marketing campaigns.
Red Team/Blue Team is a strategy where one group – typically an external “Red” team, attempts to find weaknesses in the internal “Blue” team’s activities.
In a military setting, the term Red Team is traditionally a highly skilled and organised group acting as a fictitious enemy to test the “regular” squads’ (the Blue Team’s) force-readiness with sudden, realistic assaults.
Red Teams have also been used to test the physical security of sensitive sites like nuclear facilities and government offices.
In the cybersecurity field the Red Team’s hostile activities take the form of sophisticated penetration tests, providing a reliable assessment of an organisation’s defensive capabilities and its safety status.
So how does a bunch of creative marketers benefit from a strategy that often involves brute force (in both the military and cybersecurity meanings of the word)?
Firstly, we have to make sure that this strategy isn’t just seen as a battle between two opponents, with one winner and one loser. Both teams need to recognise they are working for a common purpose, such as a calamity-proof campaign, and agree to share their findings in a constructive way.
Secondly, we must recognise that sometimes we are too familiar with our creations. We spend a lot of time working on these projects, we create innovative ideas and we are often passionate about them – and these are good things – but this can mean we are blind to potential problems. Our customers are going to be coming to the product, or campaign, or event, without that level of intimacy, so while the jump from climate change to travel insurance is an obvious step in our minds, for outsiders it may require the crossing of a bridge too far.
Your Blue Team could be made up of your marketing or communications people who are working on the particular project. This might be a marketing plan for a new product, a media campaign or an event plan. The Blue Team will have included the usual SWOTs and well-thought out SMART objectives. You think you’re set to go.
Then, you pitch it to the Red Team. A bunch of nit-pickers who aren’t blinded by the brilliance of your baby. In fact, up until now they’ve known next to nothing about it at all.
And that’s when the “what-ifs?” and “but whys?” start. It’s a bit hard to swallow, but healthy – like bran for breakfast.
The Red Team should comprise some marketing or communications people who aren’t working on your particular project who will pick up any marcomms or PR pitfalls in the plan.
It should also include a couple of colleagues with completely different roles, for example Bill from accounting, whose child has a peanut allergy, or Eva from legal, who not only sees a lawsuit in every creative move, but also is bilingual and points out the sizable audience you are about to alienate with the name for your new product.
For example, if Honda had a Scandinavian speaker on their creative team, they probably wouldn’t have called their cute little car the Fitta, which is Norwegian slang for female genitals. Lacking a Red Team, red-faced Honda folk had to change the car’s name post-launch to Honda Jazz.
Car makers seem especially prone to this kind of pitfall, so we’ve had the Mitsubishi Pajero (Spanish for masturbator); the Chevy Nova (“no va” in Spanish means “not going”); and the Renault Wind, which is relatively harmless, apart from the various puns about people passing a little Wind on the highway.
Another example where a Red Team inspection (or “interference” as creatives prefer to call it) would have helped was last year’s unfortunate UK online soccer ticket competition run by Pepsico for its Walkers Crisps brand.
The competition, which offered Champion’s League tickets, invited people to tweet selfies that would be featured alongside former champion Gary Lineker in an automated video. The trouble started when people realised that the video generator wasn’t being monitored by a real person and would accept any photo that was recognised as a human face. Soon enough pranksters started tweeting photos of various despots, serial killers and sex offenders, including our own Rolf Harris.
Poor Gary Lineker appeared to hold up a poster of each criminal in front of his head, then point out their “face” in the crowd doing a Mexican Wave with other fans, as he wished them luck in bagging a prize.
The stuff-up went viral, of course, and Walkers quickly shut down the competition, apologising with a single tweet. Given that the problem arose from the bad behaviour of the public rather than the company, there wasn’t a lot of outrage at the content itself. The Twitterverse did, however, react with sheer disbelief that the campaign creators failed to see such an obvious flaw in their idea.
If the Walker Blue creatives had tested this idea with a Red Team, they may have prevented this situation. Time and resources are always short, but next time your team is about to implement a brilliant creative idea, don’t be afraid to let a Red Team of unbiased outsiders to put it to the test – and be genuinely open to having your ideas challenged.
