There are brand campaigns, clever brand campaigns…and then there are smart brand campaigns. It is time for brands to demand more from agencies and partners in the process of building building success.
What do I mean with smart campaigns. Brand initiatives that many would argue to be clever in its form and execution are being launched occasionally for sure, but are they smart? I would argue that most of the time they are not. In my definition a smart campaign is one that…
1) grows through your brand ambassadors
2) converts involvement to action
3) collects concrete and valuable data
So allow me to expand these three points,
1) Despite the constant talk that “all digital campaigns are global” your aim is not to try to reach everybody out there. The conversation is still, arguably more than ever, local. With local, I’m not only meaning in geographical terms but equally important in terms of consumer behavior. Your focus shall be on reaching out to the consumers that are already close to you and make them the carriers of your message, spreading it within their social graph. Let’s use an example to make it clear…the average woman has 130 friends on Facebook. You launch a campaign with focus to connect with, the humble figure of, 1000 women. Without any media spend you have open up for a possible exposure to 130.000 people. All by connecting with the ones already loyal to you.
2) There is one thing to get your audience to notice your actions, and a total different thing to get them involved through your actions. The smart campaign is engineered through an interconnected set of components and triggers that evolves the initial campaign burst into a repetitive dialogue with the audience – that is what we call the recursive loop. Focus on achieving this will add value to your campaign investments and have you avoid seeing the results fade away over time.
3) Let’s be honest, learning from and adopting to consumer behavior and demand has historically been one of the traditional agencies weakest links. Like being stuck in a loop, traditional agencies have over and over created template campaigns, ever so often with weak or even devastating results. How could that be? The problem as I see it is twofold. The first is that the internal agency model has been based on “cracking the ultimate” idea, which sometimes has created an inside-out perspective, placing the need of the client in second place. The other is marketing departments that have been (and in some extent still are) lacking insights and understanding of the modern consumer, their landscape, and the role the brand play within it. A smart campaign is one that, through a tailored mix of consumer insights and technology allows your brand to collect valuable data, automatically generated through audience engagement. This allows the brand to respond to the consumer behavior during the campaign and adjust accordingly to enhance effect and focus.
The fact is that, in comparison to the past, today’s fast paced and organic marketing climate puts more demand to the creative concept and idea. Taking off-set in the traditional marketing methodology, the conceptual creative process is today closely knit together with both strategic and technological input throughout its development cycle. Failing to do so will most definitely generate scars on the final solution. I advise that the definition of a strong creative idea shall be seen as one that is meeting ALL three stages above. In other words, be careful chasing the clever one-off idea and instead, start to truly understand where, how and through what triggers you can get the most value for your money spent on connecting with, and converting the audience. The good looking model at the bar is most likely not the one you’ll marry.
/Patrik
