For all the brilliant minds who are in advertising (and yes Dorothy, they do exist), we as an industry are very good at making our lives more complicated than necessary. We constantly try to one up each other, and in our pursuit of that goal we are truly experts at confusing the living daylights out of the rest of the world. This agency is known for one thing, that one is known for another, and they will talk the ears off of clients to convince them that their way is the best.
The upshot of all this sound and fury is that we have broken down our industry into a needless series of either/or equations. We tell prospective clients about the difference between digital and traditional agencies. We elucidate on the benefits of paid versus earned media. Some agencies are about demand, and some are about branding. Those folks are online, those people over there are offline.
The problem with all these difference is they are all wrong. Maybe this was the world we lived in twenty years ago, but certainly not today. The problem is that this approach is centered on channels, instead of customers, and on assets instead of relationships. In reality, the way to look all of this is to realize that they are all the same thing.
What's a better way to approach this problem? For one, we need to start spending more time looking at the spaces in our media plans. What I mean by this is that although we are imminently capable of packing a media plan to within an inch of its life, more insight is going to come from what lives in between those channels in the plan. Because the relationship between a brand and a customer is not the only relationship we should be looking at. The other relationship is the one between the channels in our media plans.
Ever get the feeling that your fabulous integrated media plan does seem to be...well...integrating? The banners are great, the ads are getting feedback, and the call to action is making the needle move. And yet it seems that each one of these channels lives in its own little world with no relationship with the channels and assets around it.
The point is not to just figure out how different channels are working, but to figure out how they are working together. For an example, here is a past campaign for a client. The client was sending out four waves of direct marketing to support a new product launch. Although this was an effort that would be characterized as "demand generation," branding assets were also used in conjunction with call to actions to create a campaign that was representative of our Fluid Brands approach to marketing. As the market and our audience moved over time, so did our messaging and our channels.
In this campaign, the first three waves of outbound marketing had performed very well, with an over 30% increase in response from the first wave to the second, and an increase of over 50% between the second wave and third. But as competitive and market data started to be applied against the responses, it became apparent that the market dynamics had shifted since the campaign started. The audience was filtering the messaging differently, and as a result the close rate was starting to decline on the back end of the campaign.
Rather than send out another direct marketing assets, we chose instead to slot a brand campaign between the third and fourth demand waves. The brand campaign was tuned to remove the stumbling block we were experiencing at the tactical level, even though it was a "strategic branding" asset. In this function, it was not just acting as a driver on the brand level, but also as a driver at the demand level. A white paper was also dropped into this slot, creating not just a brand event but also a higher level of engagement at the tactical level.
After we had reset the messaging with the market and the audience, we then returned to the last demand wave in the media plan. Here was where our approach of Fluid Brands found traction and delivered results for the client. Our ability to change the flow of our marketing to adapt to the market resulted in an increase between this demand wave and the previous wave of over 100%. More importantly, we recovered the lost momentum further down the media plan, and in only four and a half months we lowered our client's cost per response from $99 dollars to only $27 dollars.
The lesson learned from this campaign is that every campaign asset impacts every asset around it, and understanding the relationship between channels is just as important as understanding the relationship between a brand and a customer. Brand affects demand, traditional affects digital, and earned media affects paid media. Unless you are sensitive to this, your marketing will just continue to act as a series of isolated events. But put them all together, and the whole truly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
If you would like to read more about the above campaign, you can download our detailed case study here.
The upshot of all this sound and fury is that we have broken down our industry into a needless series of either/or equations. We tell prospective clients about the difference between digital and traditional agencies. We elucidate on the benefits of paid versus earned media. Some agencies are about demand, and some are about branding. Those folks are online, those people over there are offline.
The problem with all these difference is they are all wrong. Maybe this was the world we lived in twenty years ago, but certainly not today. The problem is that this approach is centered on channels, instead of customers, and on assets instead of relationships. In reality, the way to look all of this is to realize that they are all the same thing.
What's a better way to approach this problem? For one, we need to start spending more time looking at the spaces in our media plans. What I mean by this is that although we are imminently capable of packing a media plan to within an inch of its life, more insight is going to come from what lives in between those channels in the plan. Because the relationship between a brand and a customer is not the only relationship we should be looking at. The other relationship is the one between the channels in our media plans.
Ever get the feeling that your fabulous integrated media plan does seem to be...well...integrating? The banners are great, the ads are getting feedback, and the call to action is making the needle move. And yet it seems that each one of these channels lives in its own little world with no relationship with the channels and assets around it.
The point is not to just figure out how different channels are working, but to figure out how they are working together. For an example, here is a past campaign for a client. The client was sending out four waves of direct marketing to support a new product launch. Although this was an effort that would be characterized as "demand generation," branding assets were also used in conjunction with call to actions to create a campaign that was representative of our Fluid Brands approach to marketing. As the market and our audience moved over time, so did our messaging and our channels.
In this campaign, the first three waves of outbound marketing had performed very well, with an over 30% increase in response from the first wave to the second, and an increase of over 50% between the second wave and third. But as competitive and market data started to be applied against the responses, it became apparent that the market dynamics had shifted since the campaign started. The audience was filtering the messaging differently, and as a result the close rate was starting to decline on the back end of the campaign.
Rather than send out another direct marketing assets, we chose instead to slot a brand campaign between the third and fourth demand waves. The brand campaign was tuned to remove the stumbling block we were experiencing at the tactical level, even though it was a "strategic branding" asset. In this function, it was not just acting as a driver on the brand level, but also as a driver at the demand level. A white paper was also dropped into this slot, creating not just a brand event but also a higher level of engagement at the tactical level.
After we had reset the messaging with the market and the audience, we then returned to the last demand wave in the media plan. Here was where our approach of Fluid Brands found traction and delivered results for the client. Our ability to change the flow of our marketing to adapt to the market resulted in an increase between this demand wave and the previous wave of over 100%. More importantly, we recovered the lost momentum further down the media plan, and in only four and a half months we lowered our client's cost per response from $99 dollars to only $27 dollars.
The lesson learned from this campaign is that every campaign asset impacts every asset around it, and understanding the relationship between channels is just as important as understanding the relationship between a brand and a customer. Brand affects demand, traditional affects digital, and earned media affects paid media. Unless you are sensitive to this, your marketing will just continue to act as a series of isolated events. But put them all together, and the whole truly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
If you would like to read more about the above campaign, you can download our detailed case study here.
