How Dynamic Media Planning Can Skyrocket Your Ad Effectiveness

Introduction

Everybody knows that adverts—both good and bad—can make you want to talk about them. The John Lewis Christmas ad never fails to elicit a Twitter storm of festive love. The Trivago woman drove Londoners collectively up the wall. Ofcom are regularly inundated with complaints about ads being misleading, offensive, or harmful.

Whether it’s positive or negative, one thing you can be sure of is that the public will always have a view. That said, in the usual cadence of media and campaign planning, you’ll only get real access into what this view is after the event.

While feedback can be useful for tracking a campaign’s level of success, and can help you learn lessons for next time, it’s not particularly helpful for the campaign you’ve just spent thousands (maybe even millions) on. For that, what you need is feedforward. And that’s exactly what you’ll get if you bring a touch of dynamism to your media planning strategy.

What we are proposing, is that you utilise the power of consumer insight to predict the success of campaign before it’s launched.

Working with a platform like Attest to iteratively track consumer feedback—in realtime—is essentially like having your own private social media feed. With zero risk of wider exposure, you can test consumer reactions, sentiment and even recall, refining as you go. .

Imagine being able to review what people are saying, and respond accordingly. All before the campaign release, helping you avoid any major blunders and managing risk, whilst optimising for the right impact and recall, and generating more upside.

Let’s delve into how this can skyrocket your effectiveness.

1. Isolate where your audience is at this very moment in time

It’s often the case that we think we know where various demographics’ attention is focussed. Under-25s will be on Snapchat, and over-50s will be reading the Telegraph. Right? Not necessarily…

In fact, stereotyping audiences is a recipe for disaster. We’ve recently been exploring just how easy it is to get a granular look at the population, so you can delve into exactly the pockets (as defined by interests, attitudes, behaviours and beliefs as well as just arbitrary demographics) that you want to reach.

The handy thing about segmenting your audience with Attest, is that you can go back and quiz them on exactly what they’re doing at any any given point in time, and gather their answers back that same day.

Because while you may think the affluent, 50-60 year bracket you’re trying to target, spend their days scrolling the Financial Times and their evenings watching Homeland on Channel 4, what you might not have accounted for was the fact that they had teenage children.

If you checked in with them over the summer, you might have found that earlier that day they had checked The Daily Mail because they’d been sprawled out the evening before in front of ITV’s Love Island with their obsessed offspring, and they themselves had now become fans.

It’s the sort of information that’s irrelevant within a few weeks, but if you can get to it before the moment’s passed, and before your campaign’s gone live, it can help you advertise on left-of-centre channels where you’re more likely to stand out.

Increasingly though, media outlets are facilitating dynamism. ITV have an option to buy a ‘Late Delivery Ad’ package, where your advert doesn’t have to be delivered until 6 hours before it’s shown: plenty of time to get an Attest survey out and back again, and to find out if your target audience will be tuning into that particular programme on ITV tonight (or not).

2. Ensure your advert will fly with them

In the same survey, it’s a great idea to pick their brains about whether your target segments will enjoy your campaign.

Whether you want to go down the creative testing route, and do this by showing them the whole thing, or if you just want to quiz their attitudes and beliefs to check it’s in line with how they’re feeling at the moment, is up to you.

This is where you can imagine the survey results like the Twitter storm after the event (you can even keep answers contained to just 140 characters, like the original Twitter stream many of us know and love!)

But instead of it being live on Twitter, it gives you the time to make edits, or to position your message differently. It may seem like an unnecessary step, when your whole team (and possibly an agency) has told you the campaign is brilliant, it’s crucial to check with people who are objective.

Check in with the people it’s made for, and the people who’ve not got so close to the project that they can’t see its flaws anymore.

Ensuring the creative resonates could be the make-or-break for your whole campaign. Independent research from Nielsen (analysing over 1000 consumer ad campaigns) shows that ‘creative quality is the most important factor for driving sales,”—proving this is a step you shouldn’t skip!

3. Get your campaign out

When you know where your target audience is focussing this week, and what they’re getting excited about, you can put your campaign out, sure in the knowledge that it will be a roaring success.

Findings from the same Nielsen study cited above also found that “due to new breakthroughs in data and technology, media is playing a much larger role than before,” meaning you need to find the perfect combination of quality creative, and the right media channel, to create breakthrough ad effectiveness.

By combining both findings from your research on Attest’s platform, your advert will not only be far more likely to be effectively resonating with people, but it will be sure to be finding the right eyes.

Considering the enormous budgets spent on branding campaigns, every pair of eyes that see it, that don’t belong to a potential customer, are a waste. Keep efficiency high by ensuring you’re dynamic enough that you can get your adverts in the channels people are using at that very moment in time.

If you find, in talking to your target audience, that there’s a particular issue or event that is currently on their minds, you may even be able to build a reactive campaign. Operating in real-time can help a small company land itself firmly in the spotlight with people who would never usually notice them.

Working in an agile way can really help smaller, leaner teams to compete with brands that have much larger pockets, but less reactive turnaround times (due to sign-off processes and other internal bureaucracies).

Cast your mind back to the Norwegian Airlines campaign of 2016. Since the newspapers, magazines and social media outlets were dominated by one of the most famous celebrity breakups in recent history, the airline saw a way to cash in on the share-of-mind already being accumulated by this story.

In the words of Stine Steffensen Borke, Norwegian’s Marketing VP at the time, the key to the ad’s success was the company’s ability to be dynamic when it came to their marketing:

With so many brands jostling to be front of consumers’ minds in an age of constant information, it’s more difficult than ever to market a proposition that inspires and captures attention through a great product and service alone.

It takes more, and as a fast growing airline building brand presence in new markets, we apply a challenger brand mentality to the way we market ourselves, highlighting, Norwegian’s character, charm and uniqueness.

Real-time marketing presented us with an opportunity to quickly demonstrate our brand personality so we developed a playful ad—with the simple caption “Brad is single”. We then strategically chose media outlets across Scandinavia, Spain and the UK to place the ad in order to generate maximum impact to allow us to become part of the conversation.

Conclusion

The success story of Norwegian Airlines aptly illustrates the way that dynamic media planning can skyrocket the effectiveness of your adverts. The brand—usually unheard of in the UK—went viral through just a few newspaper adverts and tube boards. They isolated that their target audience—monied workers, always eager to go on holiday—were on the London Underground, reading papers like the Evening Standard. They worked out that the story on those people’s lips that week was Brangelina, and they capitalised on it.

With a tool like Attest, that gives you real-time insight into the biggest topics, behaviours and attitudes amongst specific segments of the population that day, you can incorporate dynamism into your media planning strategy from the outset. Month in, month out. You can effectively plan to be ‘reactive’ by always staying on the pulse with consumers! Remember: feedforward.

We can help you pulse-check what your target consumers are tuning into on any given day, so that even on static platforms, like newspapers and billboards, you can make sure your ads are moving in concert with people.

And if your media budget incorporates digital ads, you may even want to adapt and tailor them as you go along to ensure the creatives are note perfect, every time.

The result of a well honed creative, delivered at the perfect time, in just the right channel? Out of this world ad effectiveness!

Get in touch with us to revolutionise how you plan your media strategy and start enjoying a competitive edge that will boost your brand (and your career) to new heights.