RPA’s Joe Baratelli: How Respect Drives Results — and Vaccines
The creative chief of the agency that made “We are Farmers” a hit explains how their approach to marketing insurance and vaccines is similar…and different. Joe Baratelli sings the praises of respect.
“Try to recognize and acknowledge where people are individually. we're all in a weird place right now. We need to be conscious of those states. Put yourself in their shoes, and if you can do that, then you're going to come up with something that resonates and is memorable.”
Thanks to Los Angeles-based agency RPA, “We Are Farmers, buh bi dum dum dum dum dum” has become a bit of a jingle earworm. Great awareness and brand recognition for the insurance company. But in an era of ubiquitous focus on health, the AOR of Farmers and Honda sought to expand its portfolio to include more healthcare clientele, and did well by doing good for UNICEF.
Joe Baratelli, EVP and Chief Creative Officer of the agency that’s been his home for almost 35 years, walked us through those and other creative concepts and their business results. It starts, he suggests in this conversation with E.B. Moss, with the mantra of the organization: People, Relationships and Results.
How are those three pillars of RPA imbued in its culture ...and how do they impact clients?
First, we try to treat everybody fairly and try to be supportive. Servant leadership is one of the tenets. It's about putting the people that are doing the work first. ...Our clients are thinking about the results and the people on the end of the communication that we're trying to either attract or influence or move to action. So, if you start with that result of, "Hey, we're just trying to reach somebody in their day to day lives” -- treating customers with the respect that they're intelligent and can make their own decisions, and they can figure out a storyline and understand what our clients are trying to say -- I think there's a big, positive aspect to that kind of marketing.
You really have to be especially careful to respect the audience for campaigns like UNICEF’s #VaccinesWork or the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, I guess. How do you tackle difficult topics like that?
You try to look at it through the lens of who we're trying to reach and what their feelings and issues are, supported by data of course. For example, people might not be thinking about childhood vaccines because few of us have experienced polio like our parents or their parents did. But we need to reassure people, too.
In this particular case for UNICEF, you might not know vaccines work; that the science is there. We needed to remind people that that is the case. So, the psychological part of it was, "Hey, we would do anything to keep our kids out of trouble.” Kids are mischief-makers. They're curious. They're trying to figure their way out through the world, and we would make sure we protect them from a hot stove or from falling.... Yet, when it comes to something that may be most important, which is inoculating somebody, to make sure that these terrible diseases don't wreak havoc, we have to remind people that things work and make that a simple connection.
What were the directives from UNICEF in this case?
In this case... I think there are many naysayers and misinformation out there that a campaign like this can help combat. And I think that that was what UNICEF was asking us to help them with: that “there are some dangers you can see and some you can't.”
We did it in different ways: there was a film, GIFs and posters, social media, and a whole strategy to put it out there for UNICEF across the world in different languages. We tried to dig into the cultural stories that would resonate with people worldwide. And it worked. But, it kind of always goes back to aiming for what's the basic emotional response that you would want to get from somebody.
Did you get pushback or uptake? What were the results?
I know that anecdotally it was a success; they got a lot of goodwill and positive response from it. UNICEF sets calendar events for certain international days, and one of them was around vaccinations. So, this was a campaign that was a week or ten days. But, in a campaign like this, you're looking at it for the long term impact of trying to change people's behavior.
Can you give us an example of a campaign where you've had to speak to both brand and demand?
I think Apartments.com is one in that we had to introduce a product that can benefit a lot of people. The results were measured of getting people actually to go to the site. There are many people looking for apartments; if we can get them to type in “apartments.com” rather than go to a search engine for apartments or classified ads, we could achieve great results.
With Farmers there’s been a change in the business landscape from when we first got that account ten years ago. Then it was about putting them on the consideration list. We had to break through between Geico and Progressive, and even name confusion with State Farm. We needed to make sure we created something that would get noticed.
But once you get within that top consideration list, now you need to offer reasons to call or to request a quote, or whatever that metric is. Because it’s an agent-based business we needed to talk about value. It isn't just the lower price or “click and save.” It's about, "Hey, you have some things to protect. You want to make sure you're covered. So that campaign has morphed from what was awareness that we have good agents to, "Hey, if you're a little smarter about what you need, then you're going to be more protected, and we can help you with that.” And then that changed to the experience angle of, 'Hey, we know crazy things happen out in the world, and we have the experience to cover whatever you need to be covered."
So, we're continually monitoring, listening, doing research to find out where things are going within the business and cultural landscape to make sure we're hitting the right notes for whatever the business problem is we're trying to solve for.
“Try to recognize and acknowledge where people are individually, and where they might be as a collective. we're all in a weird place right now. We need to be conscious of those states. Put yourself in their shoes, and if you can do that, then you're going to come up with something that resonates and is memorable.”
With the UNICEF campaign, the premise is that kids are always putting themselves in danger because their job is to sort of test and learn, which is sort of like advertising: you're testing and learning! So, how do you iterate based on incoming data?
In a situation like UNICEF we get one input dump from them from their years of experience [and insight on how] different parts of the world are dealing with various issues. We needed to distill all that down and come up with something universal that will play at an emotional level.
But, for other businesses, we help them with our research upfront -- about the marketplace, the business problem, the culture, what's going on from a human behavior standpoint, even using our behavioral science division that looks into how people act and why they're thinking this way. Then you put it out in the world, and now you've got market tests so we can push and pull for results. But we try to look at it holistically because how somebody reacts to a Facebook placement differs from how they might respond to a television commercial.
Talk about how one goes from marketing cars to health care.
We're a little independent shop, not part of a big network. We needed to get some recognition for things outside of, say, Honda and Farmers so we made a conscious effort to do pro bono work. We had a relationship with the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation [RPA created the 20 videos for the “Imaginary Friend Society”] because Honda is a contributor and we always try to help raise awareness for the Foundation. We thought about we could do to help them and, in turn, help ourselves. It was the same with UNICEF: when we have the bandwidth to take them on, we want to contribute, and hopefully do something good for them. And ultimately, it comes back as good PR for us.
And so, has that sparked other healthcare clients as well?
Yes. We got a lot of recognition and won a big hospital network here in Los Angeles – Cedars-Sinai. I'm learning a lot about how hospitals work and their different divisions, and what they need to accomplish. We also have the opportunity to do some work for the state of California and its [COVID] vaccination efforts too.
It’s been great for the agency to get recognition. But what I like about it is the fact that we're doing something good for society. We talk a lot about trying to build relationships with our clients, and customers... But ultimately, I think it's about trying to gain people's trust.
They might not be in the market for an automobile, or looking for a hospital right now, but when they do need a new car, or need to go to a hospital, you want them to think of the ones that are most like them.
Any recommendations for how to manage brand awareness and navigate the consumer landscape in these weird times?
Try to recognize and acknowledge where people are individually, and where they might be as a collective in that we're all in a weird place right now. We need to be conscious of those states. Put yourself in their shoes, and if you can do that, then you're going to come up with something that resonates and is memorable. We know that if you have the awareness on the upper level and the reasons to act on the lower level of the communication funnel, then it works.
Ed. Note: You can listen to the full interview as a podcast.
February 1, 2021
