We’ve all pressed the skip button, swiped dismissively on TikTok or picked up a phone during the ad break – countless times. And yet despite our collective ad-blocking, finger-swiping savviness the process and the output of media planning has stayed largely the same. This is completely at odds with how we all choose to engage with brands and buy products – the popularity of Instagram and TikTok has decimated the traditional comms funnel.
With this shift in audience behaviour and brand expectation, I believe we need to plan campaigns in a new way.
Instead of a one-and-done approach, we build the plan around a process of incremental improvements and iterations of our creative assets; optimising each on real-time measurement and audience signals. We start slow, we test, learn, improve – ultimately growing both campaign reach and efficiency and effectiveness.
So why then are we still planning brand campaigns in the same way?
I believe it is simply the lack of creative assets available to plan with. Big brand assets (especially TV shaped ones) are incredibly expensive and time consuming to make, meaning we have fewer at our disposal. Plans are built around the number of assets available; a tease phase followed quickly by the big reveal fired into every home across the country at peak times in the hope that everyone saw it at the same time.
But what if we had the tools available to make every single asset quickly and at a fraction of the cost, plus also make it dynamic, template-able and ultimately create a thousand more versions?
Well, those tools are coming – powered by GenAI. With this automated revolution in creative production of brand assets plus the increase in volume, this is our chance to plan for a modern ‘skip-ad’ audience.
I call this new approach Minimum Viable Campaign planning.
MVC is more akin to software development than entertainment; with less ‘bang’ and more long term value. Campaigns powered by dynamic creative with addressable strategy at its heart, where AI tools ensure continual iteration and optimisation of messages delivered to the right audience – again and again. Campaigns that increase in efficiency, relevance and effectiveness and last for longer.
This sounds a lot like performance marketing. But why not do it for brand? What if we changed the way we saw campaigns to software releases rather than big bangs with a limp fizzling out before being completely ignored?
Ideas are essential
What often separates a brand from a performance campaign is the presence of an idea. And just like any great software, it’s not enough to just follow the process of improvement when there’s nothing good to improve upon. These ideas however come with their own requirements – they need to be flexible and dynamic, they need to work in different environments with different audiences and communities – essentially what we need is ‘addressable ideas’ (Think ‘Snickers you’re not you when you’re hungry’ or ‘Spotify Wrapped’)
Setting up the MVC
We start small. No big bang, no massive reveal, no fanfare. Instead our MVC is released into the world and we measure and we improve, continuously. We optimise the creative, the message, we build special ‘features’ for subsets of audiences, we develop premium versions for some partners and it builds and grows. Until it doesn’t any more. Then we stop it. Imagine a 5 year campaign? That’s the average lifecycle of a startup in silicon valley.
This has to be a more efficient way to spend our clients’ money. We’d have to rewire how we produce creative, how we plan media, how we test, how we measure – that’s a lot of rewiring to do. But if we were able to pull it off, it could be massive for the industry.
Gone would be the reliance, the pressure and the production cost of a few big ATL assets to kick off the campaign. The advance in AI-powered video production will mean we can generate as many ‘versions’ of an asset we need for our MVC – effortlessly swapping out everything from actors, to environments to products.
Underpinning all of this thinking are two assumptions; the first being by using real-time campaign performance data to optimise every aspect of the creative will positively impact the potential of it being more relevant. And secondly, that by making campaigns more relevant to our audience we’ll see an increase in effectiveness and ultimately business performance.
We know we can’t keep planning the same way in a world where everything has changed. So if the old shape was much like a firework fired into the sky – a big flash and a loud bang, the new plans instead can be visualised as a slow and steady climbing path. But where does the path take us? Well, by developing an ‘addressable idea’, and following the optimisation approach of the MVC – the slow and steady climbing path can take us up through the clouds and toward the stars.
