What even is a campaign anymore?

Having never actually worked in traditional advertising, I’ve never thought traditionally about advertising. 

To me, a campaign has never been a TV slot. And not that they are now irrelevant or uninspiring (though they often are), they have become such a tiny piece of the purchasing puzzle.

It used to be; see ad on TV, see poster or print ad, buy thing. 

Then, for a while at least, it was; see pics on Instagram and surf reviews and buy thing. 

Now, it’s so unrecognisably fragmented I would submit my customer journey description to the Booker Prize for a winning work of fiction. 

I bought a top the other day because I reverse-image-searched a screenshot of what a diva was wearing in the cover photo of a Substack article from someone I wasn’t even following. Try accounting for that in your pipeline. (Actually, the lesson there is that investing in quality imagery has compounding benefits, but that’s for another day.)

The potential purchasing universe involves not only TVCs but streaming, YouTube, reels, threads (I guess), FYP algorithms, channels, Substack, LinkedIn, carousels, print, posters, taking videos in front of said posters, events, activations, collabs, influencers, content creators, merch, retailers, testimonials, community, pretending to have community, email, SMS, Facebook groups, tram wraps, Pinterest, Twitter, BVOD, chatGPT, the promotions tab in my Gmail app I occasionally click into when I’m sad, digital banners, and smoke signals. 

And yes, I know I’m mixing platforms with formats and partners. I don't care. That’s how it feels. That’s what we’re contending with. It’s a shit show. You can’t be an expert in all of it. And yet a campaign must feel native to its platform and well produced for the right format. 

Your audience is an expert in the platforms they’re on. So if you show up incorrectly or even just kinda weirdly, you’ll leave a bad taste.

That’s why a solid brand platform is so critical. It’s the anchor in the ocean of fragmentation and ensures your brand is singing the same tune wherever it can, or at the very least harmonising.

There’s all of this to consider, and people still want a pipeline?! If not a pipeline, then certainly data. Numbers to prove effectiveness. Because they’re being held accountable. I find that marketing managers look to their agency for 100% confirmation that their campaign will be successful. But without a working crystal ball, we can never know that. 

And what is success anyway? Guaranteeing views and guaranteeing the business still exists in a year are two very different success markers. The uncomfortable truth is that the best ideas are instinctive. Will it work? I don’t know! It’s never been done before! But bosses don’t want to hear that. 

Bosses want bureaucracy and data and what they think is strategy, but is actually bloated deck pages full of maxims. I want to grab the marketing manager’s shackled hands and say blink twice if you need help. And why is it that CMOs are uniquely beholden to other leaders for making decisions within their own remit? I think we know why, but that’s for another day.

Sometimes a good idea is fuelled mostly by “that would be cool”. And you can either trust a creative’s judgement on that or not. When we are tied to numbers and “evidence” to appease the higher-ups, then that is one way to make a mediocre campaign. Not a bad one. But not a great one. We can measure marketing more than ever, but is anyone enjoying ads more?

A campaign needs to feel like a big moment to the people it matters to most. 

Sorry to harp on about it, but the brat launch campaign is a perfect example. To me, it was a monocultural moment that I couldn’t escape. And I was happy to see it across all my feeds. And I mean all my feeds. Even Charli’s doxxed Letterboxd account felt brat. I would see that shade of green in my personal life and take a photo. Do we add photo album app to the list of platforms a campaign can live within? It felt like I, like every other person on earth, was part of brat summer. 

But the reality is quite different. I was just a prime target for a highly effective campaign. A pretty big campaign, sure. But it wasn’t even close to the budgets of many global players, and yet they were completely eclipsed. 

The beauty is that not everyone experienced brat like I did (my dad would think bumpin’ that means getting my car in a bingle). But it made a massive impact on the people that mattered. 

Time and time again, I find myself giving the best advice I can to brand managers ahead of a campaign. Get sick of it. Because you’ll be SO OVER IT way before anyone else has even clocked that a campaign is happening. 

Campaigns need to saturate. Drench the right people’s feeds and worlds. This doesn’t necessarily mean bigger budgets; this means an insanity-inducing level of relentless dedication to amplifying the campaign across all core channels (social, email, web, ads). Again, I say to marketing managers, blink twice if you need help.

I think brands are quite good at doing the pre-teaser and the launch, but then the internal teams get tired. When really this is when you need to double down on what's working, go hard on interactions, comment on viral accounts and videos, answer FAQs, capture even more UGC, create tutorials and EGC. Put paid spend behind the best-performing organic content. And then a month or two later, blast it all over again.

Seriously, you should be sickened by the sight of your own campaign. And then you know you've maybe, MAYBE blasted it enough. That's what a campaign needs to be today.

What hasn’t changed about campaigns.

No matter what an agency pitches as their secret formula to ideas, whether it’s a workshop or writer’s room, a batshit crazy wall or a dog as their head of HR, nothing beats a good idea. 

At W&B, we work with insights and ideas. This is not new to anyone. But it works.

An insight comes from the audience, the zeitgeist, or behaviour more broadly. It should feel revolutionary but obvious. A fact is that bananas come in their own durable carry-case. An insight is that this makes them the perfect packable poolside snack. 

An idea is a strong narrative or visual concept that earns attention. So this might be to create a banana swim pass, offering free entry to anyone bringing a banana to a public pool (a real campaign by Big Banana). You can’t deny that it’s attention-grabbing to see all the bananas amongst the banana hammocks. 

Sometimes, a campaign is just a cool idea, likely never formalised with a written insight. But I think it’s because these creatives (or more often than not social media managers) are instinctively insightful. They don’t talk corporate, but they just get it. And they can deliver effective creative. But what classifies as effective?

The number one goal for any campaign is to move the needle on mental availability, aka brand salience, aka how a brand lives in your mind.

Mark Ritson loves to talk about mental availability and Tracksuit Data loves to track brand salience, and I like to refer to it as how a brand lives in your head. I think it conjures up a perfect little picture of a cartoon brand mascot who has moved into your mind. How much space are they taking up? Are you happy for them to be there? What have they pasted on the walls? Are they kicking your skull?

If you, as a brand, live in someone’s mind at all, then that is pure gold. That’s a perception. And you can’t put a number on that. At least not yet... For now, it’s impossible to track how many people think something, ANYTHING, about your brand. But it is possible to put a lot of effort into trying to get there.

If you’re going to move into someone’s mind, the least you can bring is good taste. And I think that’s what a campaign boils down to these days.