Effort is an ROI multiplier
Media planning has changed immeasurably in the last 15 years. It’s now a discipline overflowing with theory, structure and best practice, and as a result is increasingly pitched as a sure thing: a safe, predictable way to buy future trade and market share. A formula to be followed, not an act of creativity or creation.
This has been fantastic for raising the floor of the industry. The amount of money spent on folly, fraud and nonsense has reduced hugely, the average media plan is probably as effective as it has ever been.
But in raising the floor we risk simultaneously removing the headroom for brilliance.
While it suits some to pitch advertising as a consistent, dependable, scientific exercise - where the only differentiating factors are media cost, nebulous ‘data signals’ used to inform ‘targeting’, and whether there’s a dog in the advert - the reality is it really isn’t. It’s a probabilistic investment which needs to survive interaction with human beings, and like all investment it carries risk and return.
The most profitable, most effective, highest-returning media planning is the product of effort. Effort is the most important, most commercially consequential commodity in our industry. Everything that makes a campaign a positive outlier exists downstream of hard work.
Getting to know your audience, or your category, or the wider cultural context in which the campaign sits.
Thinking about when it should run, where in the country it might work hardest, what time of day it will work hardest, what frame of mind someone might be most receptive to a message.
Mapping that against the relative costs of being in those spaces and times, balancing breadth and depth of engagement.
Moving beyond channels, to formats, sites, spots. And working out how all of them coexist alongside one another.
Exploring the possibility of making something new, conjuring something out of thin air that might really make your customer think differently of you, then bringing it to life.
The problem is, when this is done well, the ‘right’ answer is unique every time. So it never gets measured or mentioned in studies of marketing effectiveness. Everything that relies on aggregates and repeatability misses the power of the unique and distinct.
It’s also hard to scale and standardise and sell at wafer thin margins, so it suits a lot of the industry to just ignore it.
In becoming obsessed with the repeatable drivers of effectiveness, we have reduced the space for the distinctive ones that make the biggest impact.
The biggest multiplier of campaign effectiveness is how much time people who know what they’re doing have spent thinking about how to make it work well.
In every creative industry - filmmaking, music, photography, cooking, writing - excellence is a product of expertise and effort. When we try to pretend we are a scientific industry rather than a creative one we forget the absolute fundamentals, and stop bothering to try.
As always, I’d love to know what you think.
Greg