Integrated Campaigns. If you build it …

The Cogs of Empirical Marketing, Part 3

Welcome back to the Cogs of Empirical Marketing — a better map to help you diagnose problems, drive strategy, develop tactics and grow your brand. 

Because once you know exactly where you are, you can chart a course for precisely where you want to go. 

This week we’re talking about integrated campaigns. What are they? Why are they? How do they work? How do they work together? 

The idea behind an integrated campaign is staggeringly simple — bring all of your long-term brand advertising and short-term performance marketing into the same campaign universe. 

From the strategy and creative side, it looks something like this:

Start by building your campaign platform with a business problem to solve, a consumer problem to solve related to your brand (usually a category entry point) and a big idea. 

The big idea can be a human truth, a brand truth or a cultural truth. The best big ideas, generally speaking, are found somewhere near the intersection of all three. 

But your big idea doesn’t have to be some profound observation about the human condition that no one’s ever thought of before. It just has to surprise, delight or resonate somehow.

This is your campaign platform. And all your marketing and comms — the campaign concept, TV and audio spots, OOH, OTT, earned media, print ads, fame tactics, events, sponsorships, brand collaborations, influencers, landing pages, retargeting, etc. — is built around it. 

When Diamond Kote® — a premium home siding system brand — came to us, they were a DTC ( direct-to-contractor) siding manufacturer with little to no awareness (and barely any mental availability) outside the industry. They were a well-oiled sales machine, but they wanted homeowners to ask contractors for Diamond Kote®. 

So we decided to build a campaign platform around a category entry point. 

A lot of siding brands lean into quality and durability, which we felt were table stakes for a premium siding system. 

The advantage Diamond Kote® has is that it comes in literally any color and a variety of styles. Buyers truly have endless design options. And that’s where we decided to play. 

Because people only think about home siding when they need it. Of course, that’s true of a lot of brands. For example, you’re not thinking about Guinness right now. Okay, you are now, but you weren’t thinking about Guinness before you got to the part about thinking about Guinness. You get the idea.

Home siding is a big, involved purchase that you make once, maybe two or three times in your life. And you really only think about it when you’re building a new house, or you’re replacing old or damaged stuff. Or you really don’t like how your house looks. 

With Diamond Kote®, new siding is really an opportunity for personal expression. It’s a chance for homeowners to show the world their sense of style and taste. And if it happens to make the neighbors a little jealous, cool. 

Our campaign platform became “Design without limits.” And to bring the idea to life, we developed an infinite tunnel device and used it everywhere — in motion and static banner ads, social media ads, search, print and video. 

Oh, and there was a ton of really smart media strategy behind it all.

Audio spots did not feature an infinite tunnel, obviously, but the messaging centered around the big idea of endless design possibilities.

In an integrated campaign, it is critical that everything looks and sounds the same. Each ad has a different job to do. Some build memories and emotional associations with your brand; some drive immediate sales or leads. 

Ultimately there’s no such thing as brand vs. performance. Or even brand + performance. It’s brand x performance. There’s a multiplier effect. 

Okay, so what about media mix? 

You know the challenge. The media landscape is splintered. Everyone is everywhere. You need to reach as many people as possible with the media budget you have. And it is abundantly clear that more channels typically mean greater ROI. 

So which mix is right for you? Well, that depends … on your brand, your category, your business goals and even how comfortable you are with risk. 

Jason Bell, Felipe Thomaz, and Andrew T. Stephen of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford recently did a lot of really cool math with really large data sets and found that different channels are, well, different. 

According to “The Effects of Advertising Media Channel Combinations on Brand Performance”, channels actually do have specific strengths and weaknesses.

“There are reasons to use (or not use) a channel beyond reach, impressions, or frequency. The coverage of a target market (audience composition) is not the only contribution of a channel. One might excel in awareness, while others drive motivation. Channels are not perfectly fungible, and managers should consider the unique individual functionality of channels relative to other available channels, along with the potential for complementarity in the media plan. 

“The implication is that the value of a media channel is not a function of simple supply constraints (i.e., “how many views can I buy?”), but also of the channel’s positioning and differentiation (i.e., “what do I accomplish with a view?”)”

In other words, some channels are better at some things, worse at others and reach is not the only thing to optimize for. Don’t necessarily choose a channel just because your audience is there. Yes, that sounds wildly counterintuitive.

In other other words, there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to media strategy. And that’s why we have an incredible media team here at SRH. Milly, Peter and Maurice are, not to put too fine a point on it, stone cold geniuses. 

A few final things …

1. For integrated campaigns, consistency across channels is critical. 

Your audience — no matter where they are — needs to notice the ads, remember the ads, associate the ads with your brand and remember the message. 

That’s asking a lot from people who don’t care about your brand until the moment they remember you solve a need/want/desire they happen to have. And to make it even more fun, memory decays over time, so you’ve got to consistently build and rebuild those memories. 

2. Consistency also drives large business effects, including sales, pricing power, profitability and market share growth.

Consistency over time has a multiplier effect. 

As the campaign wears in, the multiplier effect becomes obvious. 

It is so easy to get bored and try something new. Or maybe a new CMO comes in and wants to “take the brand in a whole new direction”. Maybe that’s a good thing. But if you’re in year 3 of a 10-year integrated campaign that’s actually working, stay the course. It will most likely work even better in the long run. 

One last thing: Integrated campaigns scale up and down. Advertising works no matter the size of your brand. However, if you are a very small brand or a very young brand, you should put slightly more of your budget towards sales/performance tactics. 

If you would like help with any of this, give us a call. We’re always more than happy to chat. 

Sources! 

“The Multiplier Effect: A CMO’s Guide to Brand Building in the Performance Era” – WARC

“Profitability 2: The new business case for advertising” – Thinkbox

“Compound Creativity” – System1 and IPA

“Multichannel marketing: When 1+1=3” – WARC

“The Effects of Media Combinations on Brand Performance” – J. Jason Bell, Felipe Thomaz, Andrew T. Stephen, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford