Most comms campaigns are 1) pointless 2) not campaigns. ours are different.
When was the last time you actually did something because of a marketing campaign you saw? Hopefully it was pretty recently, but if we were asked to bet on it, we’d say it’s been a little while.
That’s not because the work is bad – far from it, there’s some bloody brilliant comms work being done across our whole industry. But, most of that work and nearly all the attention it generates is focused on the battle, rather than the bigger picture.
We plan our campaigns to have a beginning, middle and end with clear goals and objectives for every stage of the project. We’re not the first people to think of campaigns like this – every great general throughout history has taken this approach.
But it’s much easier said than done.
It’s far easier to have one great idea, sit back and soak up the kudos and award wins and call it job done, than it is to engage an audience around an issue for a sustained period of time.
But that’s what great campaigns do – they keep engaging an audience on difficult subjects in fresh ways. They create can’t miss moments which work together in service of the bigger picture. And at the end of them, something has changed – the world is a better place, our client’s brand is enjoying fresh adoration and we’ve got that all important warm feeling in our stomach’s from a job well done.
WHAT WE DELIVER AS PART OF CAMPAIGNS
Research
Social media listening
Audience audit
Strategy
Campaign narrative
Channel strategy
Audience journey
Creative
Ideation
Storyboarding
Collaborative workshops
Execution
Experiential activations
Digital events
Video and photography
Social + digital content
PR content
Paid social amplification
Influencer amplification
Project management
Deep
Why do we say most campaigns aren’t really campaigns? Because they’re not – they’re one off moments in time.
Campaigns don’t appear from nowhere, then disappear just as quickly – they deliver multiple activities over time and build towards a crescendo. Doing this requires a strategy – while a one off stunt is great, it’s not a campaign if it stands alone.
So we do the thinking first – mapping out a campaign to understand all the different ways it might catch people’s attention. Even if we have the best stunt idea in the world (and we’ve had our fair share of them), we know only a tiny minority of people will ever see that stunt in person. So we map out the audience journey from multiple different perspectives – ensuring no one’s ever left feeling out of the loop by one of our campaigns.
Once we’ve nailed this, we map out our content approach and ensure we’re finding ways to talk to your target audience on their terms – whether that’s by taking over their favourite influencer’s instagram account or going straight to the source and joining the Thursday night socially distanced bingo game in the village hall.
we say no to projects which don’t have a meaning behind them
Considered
Good campaigns have an objective. Great campaigns show how every part works together to deliver on that objective – moving your audience towards your end goal. That doesn’t have to happen all at once – sometimes the best thing to do is only reveal the story piece by piece and lay a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow.
Other times, we’ll make a big splashy bang, then follow it up with targeted, relevant content which gets people thinking, talking and taking action.
Meaningful
Our campaigns have a point. That could be something as seemingly simple as helping understanding what Brits think it means to be good in 2020, or something much bigger – like helping save the rainforests by convincing Brits to say no to Palm Oil. Check out our Pongo case study
But every single one of them has an end goal in mind which will make life better. And we say no to projects which don’t have a meaning behind them – there’s no point spending all that money if three months later absolutely nothing has changed. And that purpose has to feel authentic to the brand and the audience.
We won’t make up a reason for people to care about your brand, but we will help you find a genuine cause or issue to take a stand on. And we’ll find the right people to help you tell that story and get the world talking.
There’s no point half-assing a campaign.
Ambitious
We won’t give you safe ideas or stories which will make a tiny splash then disappear.
When you work with us you get big, bold thinking which scares you a little bit. Because it’s the scary ideas which have the potential to change the world. So if we’re not scared by the ambition, and you’re not scared, we clearly haven’t thought big enough.
Ready to do something different? Get in touch today.
