Building Great Campaigns — the Ogilvy Way!
We Admire People Who Work Hard, Who Are Objective and Are Thorough
Life is difficult when it comes to understanding people’s mind, I am no psychologist to be awarded a degree of communicating with a person’s mind, body and soul. I am just a student. I learn, I unlearn and I become better with every bit of information I receive.
When I was a kid, I always dreamt of greatness. Unknown of the fact that I will have to work this hard to achieve what I believe in. Being a below average student, I thought education is the key to walk the perfect path of life. It is indeed, but knowledge is the heart and soul of education and not the degree. I learnt it the hard way! Rising up from ashes I completed my masters in business administration to know that a bio-technologist would be working in an IT services company. Well, what can we say! Life has its own twisted way of saying your path of success is defined not by what you want but, how hard can you work to get it!
Hard Work Never Killed A Man
Looking for a mentor, I stumbled upon Ogilvy. Little did I know, the person’s one line which I read will have such an impact on my life. I found my role model for success Mr. David Ogilvy! Too far-fetched. Believe me, I feel the same! Being a dependable employee (I hope my current organization agrees!), I need to play a lot of roles; a business manager, a product manager, marketing executive, a designer etc. but, strategy as a field took my heart.
A campaign strategy is one of the most difficult and tiresome task when it comes to showcasing your skill sets. There are so many stakeholders who we end up pleasing and then, having bad marketing campaigns. This got rectified when we followed some rules:
How to Build a Great Campaign, the Ogilvy Way!
I would just like to express my learnings from the books I have been reading;
Every marketing ideology comes with its pre-cursors. To run a successful campaign, these are some of the rules and regulations we need to follow:
Follow a Discipline
Anything we work upon, if it is not done through a set of process, with rules and regulations it can end up in chaos. Any artist when captures their notes, thoughts or work follow a process to get repeat success. Following discipline is extremely hard, especially when we are in an environment of dynamicity but, this discipline creates the flow of ideas from inception to execution with time-bound goals.
A Good Advertisement
A good advertisement depends entirely on the school of thoughts you carry; one being the cynics way of getting the client’s “OK” on it. Another being creating the ad which marvelous and remarkable. And the last one being, one which sells the product by drawing an attention to it. A good advertisement works only when it is an combination of all of these.
Refraining from defining the marketing efforts as creative
The marketing campaigns are a science of communicating the right context to the right person. It involves a team effort from the strategist, account managers, designers, copy writers etc. So, do not undermine the effort you are actually investing into it.
Learning from the Magic Lantern
I have read, magic lantern is the framework which exposes you to harsh realities of advertisements. In this, we take a look at following things:
- Experience and know what are mail-order advertisements
- Experience and know departmental stores ads
- Research on what people like to read
- Research on what people like to watch
- Use the creation give by nature to you. “YOUR BRAIN”
Step-by-step approach to build a great campaign
The promise
What you say is more important than how you say it
The first step is to understand the promise of the brand to their customers. It is very important that the brand proposition and campaign proposition is very clear to the entire target segment and the consumers when it is delivered to them.
Research
Marketing campaigns are an art and science of communicating right to the consumers. And this is only possible when we know what our consumers want of the promise that is committed to them. These are the following ways to do research:
a. Create a batch of products with different promises and distribute them. Check for repeat orders from the given sample population
b. Ask the consumers to select cards of what are they most likely to buy from
c. Create series of ads with a different promise and then mail them to your sample population to get stats on how much percentage of repeat orders were received from each series
d. Another technique is running a pair of advertisements, to see which performed the better. This in our terms is called A-B Testing
e. The Forbidden Fruit. Ogilvy’s secret recipe to know what your consumers wants. I guess, this is what your guts say when you have your stats with you. The plan is to decipher this with the right plan to become successful
The Great Idea
Each Campaign needs to be built around a great Idea. It is the thought that the campaign carries with it. It is the combination of the message, the timing or the copy.
Giving the Facts
Consumers are the most important stakeholders in the retail eco-system. They are people with utmost intelligence to decipher the product and the offerings in a unique way. When, you feed the right information to consumer, they become your brand ambassadors to promote the product with facts, stats and numbers. And as research suggests, fact advertising is extremely effective when it comes to communicating with consumers.
Don’t bore people into buying
Everyday people are exposed to so much content, that relevant content is the only key to keep them interested in the buying eco-system. Consumer attention is the most important currencies across the social platforms which define brand’s success. So, it’s important to make a communication which can stand out and which people want to read.
Being well-mannered
A well-defined process, with required context within the right frame allows our consumers to connect with the brand. This process helps in conversion of customer to a loyal customer.
Making Ads Contemporary
Target users are very well-aware of the events going around them. They are readers, listeners, viewers etc. of everything that is present today, it feeds them the right information. Our ads, need to be mapped with every relevant social, political or the environmental event.
Communities can Criticize, but they cannot write ads
Most of the marketing material seems like minutes of the meeting. They are just fancy words with thoughts from the management and the product managers. A real ad is created when we do thorough research, a great though, a seamless journey and omni-channel connect.
Repeating the Ads
Sometimes our management gets tired of seeing the same advertisements again and again. Thus, that leads to taking down of the commercial before the lost of its potency.
We do not advertise to a standing army, we advertise to a parade
That is because every time, the mind set of the consumer and the viewer can be different while watching the ad. And, if the ad has given consistent results we should repeat it. This ad is like a radar sweep, it constantly gathers new prospects
Do not lie
If we lie about a product or brand, one way or the other consumers would find about it. That leads to two extreme possibilities; one, losing valuable people and second being, prosecuted by the government. Our every lie to cover up the problem leads to a scenario where brand image gets damaged. Good products and services can be sold by honest advertising. Thus, never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read.
Brand Image
Every campaign we execute, should contribute a little to the brand image. So, how do we do that? There is no shortcut, and the most powerful tool called ‘research’ won’t help. It’s all in the judgement and our feeling. The current condition of mindless marketing has led brands to become without personality, inconsistent and directed by the notion of ‘forced to change’. It takes more than uncommon dedication and gut to come up with a different idea and solve the actual problem. It is not at all easy to give a face-lift to the brand. In many cases, companies end up staring new brands (which is the easy way out) but, legacy is the key to story-telling and a successful brand.
Never be a ‘Copy-cat’
They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind
Every time you create a new campaign, someone will follow you and this only means that you innovate and make better campaigns.
We are the thought leaders of tomorrow, we believe in promoting value for the future. It is our responsibility to reform marketing and how it is perceived. So, lets change the world one marketing message at a time.
