Checkmate! Why VCCPs Creative Leaders Love A Memorable Gameplan

Chris Birch and Jonny Parker may be creatives at heart, but they are also masters of CHESS – an acronym for Character, Humour, Emotion, Surprise and Sound. These are the advertising tools they use to capture audience attention, and like grandmasters, they deploy them with calculated finesse.

Since partnering at VCCP in 2013, the pair have been promoted to executive creative directors in 2022, and then chief creative officers in January this year. They have made their mark leading successful campaigns for brands like Cadbury, Co-op and Virgin while showcasing that there’s no single formula for grabbing attention. However, they are clear that an eye/ear-catching approach taken at the right moment is the key to crafting work that resonates and stays with the audience.

“That’s not to say you can just take a tick box, paint by numbers approach; but there are levers to memory and how the brain works, things you can use to stand out, grab attention and ultimately get remembered,” Birch says.

Parker and Birch also caution that, just like in a tense middle game of chess, there is no point in playing a clever move unless it sets you up for a victorious end game – in this case creating and cementing long term buy-in.

“Being remembered is just half the battle – you also need to make sure your communications are properly attributed. There’s no point making a really cool film and nobody remembering what it was for, so there’s got to be a strong association with your brand," adds Parker.

 As VCCP’s ‘Cracking the Memory Code’ report revealed, less than 16 per cent of ads are recalled or correctly attributed. That is why, for Birch and Parker, creating legacy through memory is central to their work. 

 ‘Yours for 200 Years’ for Cadbury beautifully illustrates this, focusing on long-term brand relationships and evoking strong connections – as do other examples in the report from Compare The Market’s Meerkats to Domino’s 'Yodel' and Haribo’s 'Boardroom'. Now VCCP has released a new edition focused on the SuperBowl, which once again distils how these key ingredients helped brands like Budweiser, Heinz and Doritos make a mark at the event.

“It’s a different way to attract attention, it’s not setting off fireworks and being loud and attention-seeking. Instead, it’s looking for genuine engagement and, with the permission of your audience, sharing those moments with them in a meaningful way,” Parker explains.

VCCP’s booming success – which includes landing major accounts like Hovis and Co-op last year – is certainly a testament to the duo’s creative and logical instincts and how they’ve helped deploy CHESS in some of the agency’s most iconic works.

Cadbury

To mark Cadbury’s 200th birthday, VCCP revisited its 'Mum’s Birthday' ad but this time set it partly in the nineteenth century. In an effort to evoke nostalgia, they recreated vintage packaging and made a set of OOH with select pictures from family albums and used an AI tool to allow users to place themselves in classic posters. The personal touch meant the campaign had the all important Emotion part of CHESS in spades.

Chris: Cadbury is such a powerful and consistent brand, it’s got the font which people recognise and the colour as well. We’ve even experimented with this before where you can take the wording away from a bar of Dairy Milk and people still know what it is because the colour is so ingrained in their memory.

Recreating 'Mum’s Birthday' gave us this lens where we could reflect on the changes that have taken place in the country over the last 200 years - political, social, technological. But we could anchor it all on this little shop that has remained constant and also the consistency of Cadbury throughout the years as being present in little moments of generosity.

Jonny: It’s a lovely interaction between the shopkeeper and the girl, as well as the girl’s own kindness towards her mum. The one story encapsulates generosity and also the consistency of Cadbury throughout the years as being present in little moments of generosity.

Co-op

VCCP was tasked with helping Co-op raise awareness of its membership in a highly competitive grocery sector. The creative team delved into the retailer’s history and formed a story with heart which tapped into the supermarket’s very character. The campaign was part of a drive by Co-op which led to take-up of the retailer’s membership scheme rising by 20 per cent in the first half of last year.

Jonny: We were both big fans of Co-Op to start with and we found that researching Co-Ops long history, we came across lots of things that made us love them even more. We’d sort of forgotten that you used to get special stamps and dividends and that they were owned by their members – it rang a bell but it was something that hadn’t been talked about in a while.

Chris: It’s not really about re-inventing Co-op or Cadbury, it’s about discovering their purpose, what makes them unique. For Co-op, it was the ownership model and from there it was a short step to ‘Owned by you. Right by you.’ It’s the ownership model that makes them unique, but that’s also what allows them to do so much good – like reinvesting in local communities

Virgin Media

And what evokes smooth more than a CGI walrus riding a speedboat? After the unforgettable 'Highland Rider' and 'Handgliding Goat' – continuing only made sense. It certainly draws on Surprise and Humour. And the use of Billy Ocean’s ‘Suddenly’ for sound (the final S in CHESS).

Jonny: We’ve got a broad palette of emotions to paint with really. In Virgin Media’s ‘'Walrus Whizzer’ we were talking about the feeling of smooth broadband and we did that in a surprising and engaging way.

 It’s great to work with world-class directors like Harold Einstein on Kwik Fit or Andreas Nilsson on ‘'Walrus Whizzer' to create those moments where someone spits out their coffee at home.