How many strategists does it take to create a campaign?


Just the one.  No joke.

People love a strategy.  Before a campaign reaches the public it may well have been through the rigour of a creative strategy, a media strategy, a content strategy, a direct response strategy, a digital strategy and a mobile strategy.

There is just one strategy and I’d like us all to acknowledge that and to call it a comms strategy.  It is based on the consumer journey, on and offline, tablet and mobile.  Everything else is a set of tactics and delivery executions to make it happen brilliantly.

Today, more than ever, the strategy should start with media first given the proliferation and diversification of channels.  It’s crucial that the creative is devised to work in those channels .

We need creative in media channels that people will choose to watch, choose to interact with and choose to share and increasingly choose to buy from.  Too many campaigns still start life as audio visual content that is probably designed for a cinema screen even though it is intended for a 40″ TV.  They’re then recycled and repurposed for media channels with enormously different requirements from the traditional (perhaps adapted for an outdoor execution that really should work harder than it does) to the newer (to run on You Tube where it will mainly be skipped in 5 seconds).

The Campaign and MediaCo Outdoor CityLive challenge was to use the medium to its best advantage.  This is how creative for digital outdoor should be devised.  If digital outdoor is part of the comms strategy then the creative challenge should be to deliver copy that works in that channel, not to adapt an existing idea.

At MediaCom we believe that there are at least ten criteria we recommend should be considered before any audio visual creative is signed off for use.  These range from optimal time length (by design not just a cut down : this Audi execution is a superb use of YouTube for example as the whole ad is intended to work in 5 seconds : the time it takes the car to accelerate), to if and how it is intended to be shared.  They also include understanding the context of meshing versus stacking and how active or passive the audience to the channel is.

One strategy, delivered with creative designed for the media context.

 

 

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