Advertising is inherently a creative process, and creativity is often associated with a free-form approach to the development of ideas and concepts. The implementation of those ideas, however, should not be free form. In fact, research shows that ad campaigns benefit greatly when marketers use a tightly controlled implementation process to help them maximize results and minimize waste.
To help marketers execute their ad campaign processes, Dan Beltramo, Nielsen’s EVP of Product Leadership, led a recent webinar with several marketing experts to discuss the concept of advertising process control. The session also gave the group an opportunity to share some best practices for consistent campaign performance.
GET YOUR ADVERTISING PROCESS UNDER CONTROL
To generate consistent high performance across an organization, Beltramo emphasized the strengths of advertising process control. Process implementation within an organization isn’t a new concept, however, applying a standardized process to advertising to increase efficiencies is a new way to approach campaign execution.
To implement this process across your organization, consider the following:
Start with an understanding of where your process currently stands.
Choose a set of objective-appropriate metrics and consistently measure these metrics across every campaign you run.
Compare these metrics against an internal, organization-wide benchmark or an external, industry-wide benchmark.
The resulting data will tell you not only how your advertising is doing, but also how consistently you are producing those results.
Chances are these results will uncover some variance in your advertising performance.
Take action to lower your variance by tightening up your advertising process—dig into exactly what steps your organization takes, or doesn’t take, to implement advertising campaigns.
Identify steps or campaign elements that need improvement, and take the time to document and apply best practices. Doing so will allow you to create a well-thought out, scalable process for implementing advertising that consistently generates high performance.
By focusing on and refining how to generate results, marketers can develop clearly defined steps and campaign elements that help them focus on executing consistently high-performing advertising campaigns.
ADVERTISING PROCESS BEST PRACTICES
By leveraging results across Nielsen Digital Brand Effect studies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) category, Nielsen identified Horizon Media and Collective as companies that consistently drive high-performing campaigns. Given their track records, executives from each company shared best practices for creating and implementing advertising processes to reliably produce these results.
Mary Shirley, Horizon’s SVP of Digital Media Activation, highlighted the importance of each step of the advertising process—planning, implementation and refinement. She says that during the planning phase, Horizon has found it essential to engage with all campaign stakeholders as early as possible to ensure that each campaign is set up for success. In her experience, she says campaign execution works most efficiently when the advertising, media planning and research goals are all aligned. It’s also important for their process to remain flexible enough to accommodate custom campaign elements that may affect performance. Overall, Horizon continuously finesses their internal process by documenting insights from each campaign and sharing best practices across the organization.
Gregory Friend, Collective’s Senior Manager of Measurement Solutions & Insights, emphasized the importance of knowledge management in his organization to create a strong foundation of process implementation. With its detailed analytical process, Collective can leverage both qualitative and quantitative insights from past campaigns to inform campaign planning and execution. The company encourages teams to remain curious to find out the “why” behind campaign performance so insights are continuously developed and applied to future campaigns. By acknowledging the importance of collaboration and education, Collective has been able to develop an implementation process to set its campaigns up for success.