by BLM

The only way for brands to rise above the white noise of ad clutter and connect with consumers is to have a clear, strong and differentiating campaign idea. Integrated planning is about executing a campaign idea that is grounded in consumer insight and executing it through the most effective channels – online will often be one of them.

There are five critical questions to ask yourself as a first step to achieving successful integrated planning:

• Do you understand the consumer from an online perspective?
• Is the execution making the most of the media?
• Are your creative and media agencies working together?
• Are your media channels working together?
• Do you know what you want to achieve from online and are you measuring the right thing?

Q1. Do you understand the consumer from an online perspective?

Consumer understanding is at the heart of all good planning, more so with digital media because of its multi-faceted nature. This makes consumer behaviour complex and challenging to unravel, yet infinitely rewarding if used effectively.

However, digital media consumption is usually a reflection of someone’s lifestyle and interests. For example, a young fashion conscious woman might use digital to be the ‘first to know’ about the trends, whereas a 65 year-old might use online to connect with their hobbies/passions and share their expertise.

Different people use online for different reasons and this dictates their mindset. Both creative and media agencies need to understand the consumer mindset to develop effective communications. For example consumers using online for entertainment purposes tend to surf sites, often not looking for anything in particular. Creative in these environments can be intriguing, tempting the users to interact and become engaged. Whereas creative in task based environments – like price comparison sites – needs to be very product focused, giving the user the information they are looking for.

Planners and their clients can only begin to understand the potential role of online and how best to engage an audience when there is a true understanding.

What to do

• Ask your agency to tell you the role online plays in your audience’s lives. What they are doing and what is significant about their online behaviour that could affect the media strategy or creative development.
  
  
• Do this as early as you can so that it can inform the whole communications brief, not just the online execution.
  
  
• Make sure your creative and media agencies work together to ensure your message fits your consumer’s mindset.

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Q2. Is the execution making the most of the media?

Integrated planning is successful when agencies understand how people consume media and then correctly identify the role each digital channel (for example search, display, UGC) plays in delivering the overall communication. This is key to digital media as it can fulfill so many roles.

Integration is not about having a ‘suitcase suite mentality’ of media where each channel has a common look. For example, Dove used outdoor and TV to establish its ‘real beauty’ campaign idea, but used online to propagate its now famous ‘Evolution’ video aimed at improving self esteem among female communities. Traditional media and online where used to communicate different messages, but used together to deliver a strong overall communication.

What to do

• Understand and embrace every communications channel, and ensure your agency has experience of doing this too.
  
  
• Brief your agencies together so that the digital work isn’t shoehorned in at the end.

Q3. Are your creative and media agencies working together?

We hear about the ‘I’ word all the time, but in practice integration rarely happens. How often is it that the client presentation is the first time the creative agency sees the media strategy, and vice versa?

Good integrated planning happens when good ideas are developed with everyone (media, creative, digital, PR and direct) working together to bring it to life. The campaign idea can come from either the client or agency, but to ensure it is nurtured and successful, agencies must be happy fulfilling the role they are given. To do this the idea must come first and each agency must understand their role in its delivery.

Integrated planning is challenging, so clear direction is essential along with an inclusive working process and overall sense of collaboration between agencies. To achieve this one person (or agency) needs to own the process and this must be mandated by the client not least to counter natural inter-agency competitiveness and self interest.

What to do

• Demand that the creative and the media agency present together, not creative then media.
  
  
• Ask your media and creative agency to demonstrate how working together has informed the brief.

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Q4. Are your media channels working together? (And we don’t mean simply including a url in the TV ad!)

Too many agencies are siloed into their own area of expertise. Consumer understanding must be at the heart of the integrated process with experts on board who understand how the consumer interacts with different channels.

Curiosity is part of our DNA and online is where we go to find things. There are several studies that show the clear link between TV advertising and brand search behaviour, while others document the relationship between magazine consumption and online product research. (The IAB conducted an in-depth analysis of how radio and online work together in the media mix and are gearing up for a similar study with TV.)

If we understand how ads make people curious to know more and where they look, we can make sure we are in the right places, saying the right things.

For example, the Sony BRAVIA ads featured bouncing balls as the ‘champion’ not the TV. Curious to know more, many people may have typed ‘bouncing balls’ into Google. By buying ‘bouncing balls’ as a search term Sony exploited the opportunity to be found by interested consumers. Often this doesn’t happen and often opportunities are missed.

What to do

• Give your digital agency your marketing plans and show them the creative for each channel, so they can put your brand where consumers are looking.

Q5. Do you know what you want to achieve from online and are you measuring the right thing?

The digital landscape is constantly changing, creating new channels and communications opportunities. Much of this is unchartered territory for advertisers, so using them comes with an inherent degree of risk. However, by putting a framework of measurement in place we can understand more about the effects of emerging channels and how they work together with traditional media, reducing risk in the future.

Don’t assume all ROI metrics need to be direct response led – are your TV and print? An ROI metric might simply be the amount of times your brand has been mentioned in blogs!

What to do now

• Push your agency to identify relevant emerging channels and understand their contribution to a campaign – not just on traditional qualitative ROI measurements but by new measurement such as brand engagement.
  
  
• Ask your agency what you should measure, don’t feel embarrassed if you don’t know.
  
  
• Read the chapter on measurement, towards the end of your IAB online marketing guide.

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