Campaign creation
A campaign is your public face: an idea communicated in two or more executions (three's best) and customised across multiple media, delivered to the audience you want to target. Campaigns are the basis of all mass advertising, because they communicate brand: the sum total of what people think of you. A campaign can do three things: excite an audience, deliver a message, and drive a response.
Exciting an audience means understanding the demographic or psychographic that matters and choosing an idea and media that appeals to it. Involvement is key. Don't limit the idea to the three-button suit (the 'traditional' advertising execution of three print ads or broadcast scripts, each communicating the same idea in a different way); think across the whole mediascape and see what's best. An audience of young burger buyers will respond better to an online game than a poster flight.
Delivering a message means more than shouting: it's about talking to the right people. The web's mass of communities probably includes your target audience already: is there a way you can reach them? A valuable bit of research, an interesting fact, a joke? What matters these days isn't how you connect to your audience, but how they're connected to each other.
Driving responses is what matters to a lot of marketing plans, and there's a grab-bag of methods for doing it beyond clickable offers and money-off coupons. Is there some common cause your audience subscribes to, a cause you could take up? Are they all left-leaning? Hassled parents? United by hobbies? The best responses come when you've grabbed the heart and stomach, not the head.
It gets fun when you're dealing with several audiences, at different stages of their relationship with you, each needing the next communication delivered to them in a slightly different way. That's where the storyboards, headlines and graphics give way to the spreadsheet. Big grids of key messages mapped onto delivery dates and response periods, branching into an extensive tree with each branch trying its hardest to deliver the same result. A sale - and a customer who'll come back.
Creating a campaign involves creative thinking, strategic thinking, and tactical execution. But any good campaign can be described in a single sentence, because all the executions are recognisably part of the whole. Next: a word on programme management.