Media by i-Level

In these early stages of an internet marketing campaign, partnership between client, creative and media agencies is essential. Only through inviting your digital agencies to the ‘top table’ are you able to ensure that your campaign is fully integrated and all objectives are fulfilled.

Assessing the responses of your creative and media agencies is just as important as the briefing process, and requires the use of strict guidelines to ensure they fulfil your brand strategy, as well as the inevitable ‘gut instinct’ that informs you of the potential creative impact of your campaign.

Assessing your media agency’s response should be a mixture of two things: the rationale and your instinct.

• Budgets
• Strategy
• Past experience
• Site Mix
• Targeting
• Measurement
• Integration, integration, integration
• That 'gut feeling'

The rationale:

Budgets

Firstly, check that the budget on the plan is exactly as indicated by your agency. Exactly, If it’s over, your pay-masters will not be happy and if it’s under, you probably won’t be getting as much media bang as you could. You need to make sure things like ad serving, Advertising Standards Board of Finance (ASBOF), fees are all included, otherwise you may need to make media compromises later.)

Strategy

Once the hygiene is done, make sure the media plan reflects the strategy – a “high impact” strategy will require different formats / sites / channels / devices / buying currencies to a traffic driving campaign.

Past experience

When assessing sites and formats, and assuming you’ve run previous campaigns for the product before, track back to make sure new proposals and plans take into account learning’s and data from previous activity. Ask your agency to show that they’ve done this.

Site mix

Next, make sure the website mix is right for the audience and your product. UGC and social networks are all the rage at the moment but they may not necessarily be right for your audience. If in doubt about best practice guidelines ask for a website’s policies with regard to advertising, for reassurance if nothing else.

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Portals are great for high reach, low cost media, but will they be as effective as sites dedicated to specific, relevant content? If quite a few sites are on the plan, there’s a good chance that there will be audience cross over, i.e. if someone sees your ads on www.T3.co.uk they may also see them on Firebox as well.

Check that your agency has taken this into account – tools such as comScore can help understand optimal site mix. If the same sites keep appearing on media plans for different campaigns, ask your agency why this is. It is not necessarily a bad thing and could be based on previous performance and low pricing but could also be because your agency receives ‘kickbacks’. It is therefore advisable to make sure that sites are selected in your brand’s interests and not those of the buying agency.

Targeting

Has your agency taken into account day-parting and more detailed targeting factors? For example, if your ads are asking people to play an online game, the chances are the audience is more likely to respond at lunchtime, late afternoons and on weekends. Establish the desired audience response to the ads and this should fall into place. Your agency will have previous time / day data to establish when click-through rates are higher, when there’s more eyeballs online etc.

Measurement

How campaign effectiveness is assessed obviously depends on its objectives. If it’s a direct response campaign and you’re trying to get people to do / buy something, your agency should demonstrate that click-through, arrival and conversion rates will deliver your targets.
If you’re trying to influence audience opinion or behaviour, then more qualitative data will be needed, so a research piece could be considered, but this will probably be an additional cost. If this is the case then your agency should demonstrate that they’ve planned good coverage and frequency as how many people you reach will be important in determining value. Again, previous campaign data should give you a steer to accurately forecasting this.

Integration, integration, integration

Finally, make sure that your digital media and creative strategies are integrated – this is more important online than in any other media. If your media and creative come from different agencies, it should be evident whether they’ve produced joined up thinking or not. Further to this, you should establish how the digital work ties in with offline activity. E.g. if your print plan focuses on nationals, then how do their online properties tie in? Should they tie in? What’s important is for your agencies to show that they’ve thought about it and not produced digital work in isolation.

Your instinct:

That ‘gut feeling’

You should be excited about the strategy / plan your agency has presented you. Is it interesting or inspiring? Have you been challenged to do something new or experimental? Has your agency answered the brief and then pushed a bit further? They should. Don’t necessarily look to change the world with every campaign, but always ask whether what you’ve been presented with is going to be interesting for the audience and whether this is the best way to use interactive media. What else could we do?

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Creative, by IAB

• Communications architecture
• Creative idea
• (Simple) storyboards
• Stimulus
• Measurement
• Logistics

A clear creative agency response is required for two main reasons: firstly you need to be confident enough to sign off a campaign as it proceeds into a financially critical stage and secondly, this response will be used to justify your communications plan to other members of your team.

Due to older perceptions of online, as mentioned in chapter 2, your peers may assume that a piece of creative is direct response driven unless told otherwise. Therefore you need to be provided with this information, and the rationale, by your agency. In assessing the response from your creative agency, and to ensure you are equipped with all the right information, we recommend that you consider 6 key areas:

Communications architecture

Sometimes referred to as a communications plan, this is a pictorial diagram of the communication elements, their specific role and how they relate to one another. This is just one example for the communications architecture drawn for a fictitious brand.

In this instance, the role of the standard format display advertising is to drive traffic to the microsite. This suggests that the message needs to be more direct and with a clearer call to action than rich media advertising for example, which can be slightly more complex in terms of content and interaction. Mapping the role of each creative also identifies which type of metrics will be required to evaluate the campaign. For example, rich media is bound to attract a lower click-through rate, because the role of these executions is to engage users and raise awareness, rather than driving them straight through to a site.

Undertaking this exercise also flags up any issues if any aspect of the campaign is, for one reason or another, dropped. Using this same example you can see that if the blog or search activity are dropped, the PR element of the campaign is lost. This creates a compelling argument when trying to protect a budget that others see as a ‘nice to have’, or add on to the more traditional activity. Finally, communications architecture should have a creative idea at the heart, which leads us to the second key area for consideration.

Creative idea

‘Creative idea’, ‘Big Idea’, ‘Core Thought’ and ‘Social Currency’ are all phrases used by agencies to describe a single ‘campaign idea’ that all communications can be based upon. Communications are often delivered by specialist agencies, so getting them all to either come up with the idea together or work from the one same idea will always prove a challenge. It is essential when an idea is agreed upon that you examine each digital offering in isolation to gauge whether each execution will work. Because online is so diverse and creatively flexible it might be that a big idea cannot always deliver across the board.

One obvious example is if you have a celebrity who represents your ‘big idea’ but refuses digital rights, which is where you can fall at the first hurdle. Conversely exploring the options may liberate the campaign even further because online, you have the gift of unique online opportunities such as self-regulation and significant user dwell-time.

The creative idea should be expressed in a single word or phrase. Here are a few ways of summarising some famous campaigns in one sentence… answers won’t be at the back.

• Colour matters
• Perfect match
• Campaign for real beauty
• Rediscover the enjoyment of driving

If you don’t agree with the Creative Idea at this stage you may not like the creative, and at this point it if you have concerns, it is imperative you express them.

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(Simple) storyboards

Expect nothing more and ask for nothing more. A clearly drawn storyboard should be enough to understand how the campaign will work. Photoshop storyboards and/or working demos are not only extremely costly to both parties, but they also mean increased development time. You may also fall into the trap of being too concerned initially with the visual representation of the campaign and not evaluating its communication credentials.

Stimulus

Often stimulus material is needed to communicate how the campaign may animate and look. Mood boards can clearly illustrate the visual direction of the work, for example:



Examples of work to explain how the animation might work or how the creative might look, check out our Rich Media Roadshow Rich Media Road show or Creative Showcase

Measurement

It is important to identify at this stage how the work will be measured. Not only will this make it clear from the start what results metrics are to be returned, it also ensures that the producers of the work are aware at the early stages. The more bespoke a piece of creative the more tailored the measurement needs to be, which therefore needs to be factored into the production schedule. Moreover, measurement isn’t always free, so this can also be flagged up as early as possible in the production process.

Logistics

You should have already briefed the agency on your overall budget, which will have allowed the agency to respond within those parameters and not exceed expectations. This will allow your agency to also accommodate for some additional costs such as testing and tracking.

It is important to note that this is not a definitive set of deliverables but has a proven track record with the leading UK digital agencies. You may also recognise some of these approaches if you’ve ever done the same for a TV, print or DM campaign, and with good reason. Online isn’t so complex that there aren’t tried and tested transferable skills that are just as useful with regard to internet marketing.

Actions:

• Clearly communicate what you expect in your first response
• Allocate adequate time for them to deliver
• Evaluate what is before you and not what the campaign could be

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