An innovative and strategic thinker with the ability to achieve superior results through communication, relationship and consensus building skills, Caroline Kilgour of Lifelong Crush delineates the agency's holistic approach to production.
Can you give us a brief overview of your production structure and some of the clients you work with?
At Lifelong Crush our team is maker-minded, and passionate about working from the initial creative ideation phase right through to execution, with a production craftsmanship approach. This makes the Production discipline a critical part of our overarching strategic + creative IP at Lifelong Crush. So, while operationally structured with traditional departments, in practice our workflows, roles, and responsibilities are much more fluid, resulting in a very collaborative approach. Production is not additive, it is deeply engrained in our holistic approach.
When we opened the agency, we were not encumbered by legacy structures, and we challenged ourselves to develop a comprehensive solution for marketing teams juggling a proliferation of modern-day comms related needs. That led us to build out a nimble multi-disciplinary team. As individuals, the members of the LLC production team offer both breadth and depth when it comes to their skill sets. This translates into a very large collective production ‘toolbox’ making our team both fast and flexible.
Our comprehensive in-house production capabilities include integrated production, editorial, videography, photography, motion graphics, audio recording, sound design, basic color, HTML5 development, UX/UI and production design. We have had the opportunity to work with a wide array of clients including Kelseys Original Roadhouse, Arterra Wines Canada, Dairy Farmers of Ontario, Lee Valley, Spin Master, Nestle, Plan International Canada, RBC Ventures, Fever-Tree Canada, Asahi Canada, and Scarborough Health Network Foundation.
How does your production team utilize social listening tools to understand audience sentiment, gather feedback, and adapt their strategies for improved engagement?
Our social listening practice is led by our strategy team. They utilize social listening tools to help examine mass amounts of data about the consumers’ mindset and behaviors, specifically, the sentiment surrounding our message, which is interpreted as consumer feedback. This information allows the team to get a sense of the cultural beat, to uncover patterns, trends, and insights, which they leverage to inform both strategies and briefs. Our Chief Strategy Officer Jay Chaney likes to remind us “listening is more important than talking”, so we use listening to inform our upfront Discovery work (desk research inclusive of insights generation and trend forecasting), our ongoing campaign measurement, our optimization approach and as a tool to round out our competitive audits.
What innovative approaches does your production team take in using new tech or AR/VR experiences to create unique and memorable interactions with your audience or clients?
Our team is on a mission to create lasting impressions with audiences for brands. If net new tech helps to deepen or enhance a brand impression, then we eagerly adopt it. We recognize that new tech, when leveraged in an authentic and ownable manner, can offer brands the opportunity to heighten their cultural relevancy vis-à-vis their target audiences. When a tech led creative idea lands at the intersection of cultural interest and the human experience, we know we are on track to make an impact.
With tech prowess our team is fearless when it comes to adopting new innovations. This applies strategically, creatively and from a production standpoint. The innate curiosity that underpins our team means we are proactively engaging with innovations on a regular basis. Our incredibly supportive and generous partner network is critical when it comes to staying at the forefront of innovative developments. We believe this broader network is part of the superior offering we deliver to our clients.
How does the localization of content for different regions and cultural contexts factor into your media strategy, and what lessons can be learned from successful cross-cultural campaigns?
Identifying a universal human truth or consumer problem is central to our strategic and creative process. This aids our localization efforts as it ensures our core creative idea can transcend the potential cultural, linguistic and/or geographic barriers within the media ecosystem of a given campaign.
We believe that although our insights can transcend borders, the expression and execution of those insights can - and often should - shift. For example, in adaptation we often consider linguistic nuances in humor, integrate regional voices and influencers, or incorporate specific cultural references relevant to secondary or tertiary audiences within the media strategy.
We’ve learned to rely on our team and other collaborators with various regional and cultural backgrounds to provide guidance when needed to effectively connect with the target audiences. We use our comms planning practice to inform initial conversations with the media team and optimally that informs a highly collaborative and iterative process where media strategy is developed in partnership.