How to approach a campaign: from brief to measurement

In 1974 Stephen King of J Walter Thompson wrote a planning guide built around five questions: Where are we? Why are we there? Where could we be? How could we get there? Are we getting there? Fifty-two years on, nobody has improved on them, as Creative Salon argued on the guide’s fiftieth anniversary.

1. The brief and the diagnosis

A brief usually arrives as a solution in disguise: “we need a launch film” or “we need more leads from paid search”. The first job is to refuse it politely and ask King’s first two questions instead. Where is the brand, measured in penetration, share, price and search demand rather than sentiment? And why is it there?

Cadbury in 2007 is the cleanest example of diagnosis changing the work. After a salmonella recall the previous year, the problem was not awareness, which was near universal, but affection. Fallon London’s answer, a gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins, released on 31 August 2007 and directed by Juan Cabral, contained no product message at all, and The Drum records Dairy Milk sales rising around 10 per cent in the months that followed. Diagnose the wrong problem and every subsequent decision is precise and useless.

The output is a single page: the commercial problem in numbers, the behavioural cause behind it, and the one thing communication can realistically change. If the cause is distribution, pricing or a broken checkout, we say so, because advertising cannot fix a product that is hard to buy.

2. Audience and insight

Here we borrow from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, whose decades of buyer panel data underpin Byron Sharp’s “How Brands Grow” (2010). Brands grow by reaching more category buyers, most of whom buy rarely, and by being easy to think of and easy to find when the buying moment arrives. Sharp calls these mental and physical availability. Jenni Romaniuk’s later work on category entry points, the whens, wheres and with-whoms of a purchase, tells us which moments to attach the brand to.

So segmentation is used to understand how people buy, not to shrink the audience to a persona that fits on a slide. Light buyers who purchase twice a year are still worth reaching, and in most categories they are the majority of the volume.

An insight is not an observation. “People get grumpy when hungry” is an observation. “Hunger turns you into someone you are not” is the insight BBDO built Snickers on, and the IPA case study shows it travelling to 58 markets, gaining share in 56 of them and lifting global sales 15.9 per cent in a year. A real insight has tension in it: something true that people had not quite said out loud.

3. The single-minded proposition

King’s third question, where could we be, is answered with one sentence the brand can own. One, because attention is scarce and memory is unkind to lists. The proposition is not the headline. It is the promise the headline dramatises.

Manchester has a good example on its doorstep. McCann Manchester’s “Like Brands” campaign for Aldi put the supermarket’s own-label goods next to the famous ones in a series of deadpan comparisons. The proposition was as narrow as it could be: like brands, only cheaper. The IPA awarded it Gold in 2012 and Silver again in 2014 as the same thought kept working.

Specsavers has run “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” since 2002, written and produced by the retailer’s own in-house team. The line is a proposition, a joke format and a piece of national vocabulary at once. When a proposition is genuinely single-minded, the executions write themselves for twenty years.

4. Creative development and testing

We develop creative against three questions. Does it dramatise the proposition rather than state it? Is it unmistakably this brand within the first few seconds? And does it make people feel something? The third matters most, because the evidence says feeling does the selling.

Les Binet and Peter Field’s “The Long and the Short of It” (IPA, 2013), drawn from the IPA Databank, found that emotional campaigns produce larger long-term business effects than rational ones. System1’s Star Rating, which scores ads on emotional response and has been validated against market share growth across thousands of campaigns, lets us test for that before the media money is spent. We test for emotion and branding, not for whether people can recite the message.

Distinctive assets are built here too. VCCP’s meerkat for Compare the Market, launched on 5 January 2009, began as a way round the cost of bidding on the keyword “market”, as LBB has recounted. A pun became a character, the character became an asset, and the asset now does the branding job in every format without a logo in sight. The asset that will still be recognisable in year five is a strategic decision, not a design flourish.

5. Media and measurement

Binet and Field’s other finding is the one most often quoted and least often followed: budgets split roughly 60:40 between brand building and sales activation outperform those tilted heavily either way. Brand building is broad reach and emotion, and its effects compound slowly. Activation is search, paid social and retargeting, and its effects are sharp and short.

An agency that sells PPC and SEO has an obvious incentive to overweight activation, because the results arrive quickly and attribute neatly. We resist it. Activation harvests demand that something else created, and a plan that is all harvest and no planting runs out of crop.

Measurement is agreed before launch, not reverse-engineered afterwards. We name the number the campaign is meant to move, and we name the alternative explanations, from seasonality to a competitor’s price cut, that could move it instead. The IPA Effectiveness Awards have demanded that discipline from entrants since 1980. Last-click attribution tells you which channel was nearest the till, not which one brought the customer into the shop.

6. The learning loop

King’s fifth question, are we getting there, is the one that turns a campaign into a system. John Lewis has run the same emotional strategy every Christmas since 2009, and adam&eveDDB and Manning Gottlieb OMD proved it in the 2012 IPA Grand Prix paper with £1,074 million of incremental sales in just over two years. The lesson is not the tearjerker. It is that the retailer measured, learned and kept its nerve rather than changing direction every year.

For a smaller brand the loop runs faster and cheaper. Sales and enquiry data, read against the alternative explanations you wrote down at the start, tell you whether the plan is working or merely busy. Every quarter we go back to King’s first question and check whether the diagnosis still holds.

What this looks like in practice

None of this is proprietary. The value is in doing the stages in order, refusing to skip the diagnosis, and being honest about which numbers moved and why. This is the sequence to insist on.

• Rewrite the brief as a problem in numbers before anyone proposes a solution. If it arrives as “we need a video”, send it back.
• Size the audience by category buyers, not by the persona you find most flattering. Light buyers are the volume.
• Write the proposition in one sentence and test whether a competitor could claim it. If they could, keep going.
• Decide the distinctive asset you will still be using in five years, and protect it from every redesign.
• Pre-test for emotion and branding, not message recall.
• Plan brand and activation together, starting from 60:40 and flexing with evidence, not with whichever channel reports fastest.
• Agree the success metric and the counterfactual before launch, in writing.
• Review quarterly against King’s five questions, and change the plan only when the diagnosis changes.

Every campaign reviewed on Ad Ranking is marked on idea, craft, bravery, effectiveness and legs. This is the process we use to try to earn those marks ourselves, and the standard we expect to be held to.