A Small Agency Like Motion Sickness Can’t Afford to Not be Effective

Coming off the back of its first Global Grand Effie win, New Zealand independent agency Motion Sickness’ founder and ECD Sam Stuchbury told LBB that as a small agency, “you can't afford to not be effective.”

“Big network agencies sometimes have the luxury of doing great creative work that isn't effective and just win awards for it, but we're a small agency and the work needs to be effective,” he said.

“We need the clients to come back and want to do more and grow their businesses and grow ours … it’s at the heart of what we do.

“You see a lot of work go out in the market and everyone does a big song and dance about if it was creative … the litmus test for effective work, which people forget, is ‘are you going to run it again?’ The ‘You’re Cooked’ platform is in its third year and we’re still running it.

“Evergreen ideas that can last the test of time is a good measure of effectiveness. If you're an advertising agency, the work should be effective … it’s the job.”

The agency won the Grand Effie for 'You’re Cooked’, a campaign that tackled a serious problem: the high number of house fires caused by people attempting to cook while drunk.

Rather than tell people what not to do, the ‘You’re Cooked’ campaign offered a no-heat cookbook of recipes for when you're too cooked to cook.

For agency partner and head of strategy Hilary Ngan Kee, effectiveness is “baked into the DNA” of the company.

“It’s who this group of people are and who we are as an agency,” she said.

“The phrase ‘effectiveness agency’ doesn't naturally sit with us. I'd like to think we're an agency who are effective, but we're also obsessed with actually making the work.

“We do really care about the work and it's lovely to get this recognition, but at the same time, we can't rest because we've won … I think we all still feel like we've got something to prove, which is a great motivation to keep that back going. I don't think there's going to be any drastic shifts here in terms of how we do things.

“The thing that's exciting is that, for an agency of our size and where we are in the world, this proves we can do stuff that is world class … it proves that taking a bold approach, being confident can tick those effectiveness boxes.

“Hopefully [the win] will lead to great things in terms of who we get to work with and who we get to talk to, but also that we can keep putting out work like this that is a bit unexpected.”

Sam is also hopeful about what the recognition means for creative work that is “unconventional”.

“We as an agency get a little bit bored of advertising,” he said.

“We don't come from a traditional advertising background, and we're more about getting attention for brands and speaking on a cultural level outside of the advertising bubble. So the unconventional spin on things is kind of our brand.

“We can't grow our business with just creative work, because if it doesn't work, our clients aren't going to grow, and we're not going to grow … we need the work to be creatively effective.”

Since the win, the team has been soaking up congratulations from its existing clients, which Sam said have renewed confidence to be working with the agency. But Motion Sickness is also keen to continue its growth.

“We're getting a lot of inquiries,” Sam said. “Every two weeks we've been pitching something for new business.”

The secret sauce at Motion Sickness, as Sam sees it, is its ability to function differently to a traditional agency. The 25-person indie works collaboratively at every stage of the process, marrying strategy with creativity, and tearing down siloes.

“We’re all sitting in the same room,” Sam explained. “There’s not really a silo, it’s integrated, the strategy works alongside the creative … It's more of a collaborative process here … there's a freeness to it … just working as a team.”

“The campaign is real,” Hilary said. “The audience was so disengaged … part of the challenge was getting people to change behaviour by getting people to actually pay attention.”

Hilary said the target demographic’s engagement levels jumped “through the roof”.

“Engagement metrics [went] through the roof when you look into the tracking data that the client has in place, which is a really fantastic resource for us,” she said.

“We saw a reduction in call-outs to the fire service, according to national incident data. We also saw a drop in housefires caused by unattended cooking, our key metric.”