In an economic downturn, objectives can change pretty quickly. I saw it in the first dotcom crash. Online ad campaigns that were originally designed for one objective were, if not cancelled outright, repurposed to support direct response objectives.
It's really easy -- from a 30,000-foot standpoint -- to look at an online ad campaign that was originally designed to generate awareness, promote a brand association, or support some other brand objective and wonder why it can't be repurposed to drive e-commerce sales or some other direct response objective. As long as you're paying for the ad space, it makes sense to give the ads a call-to-action, right?
Not necessarily.
The economies of brand campaigns and direct response campaigns have led to two completely different online marketing ecosystems that overlap only slightly. Media selection for a branding campaign is likely to be completely different than it would be if the campaign supported a direct response objective.
Rather than try to make ads pull double-duty, a brand manager would be better off having the agency cancel the rest of the brand campaign and design a new DR campaign.
A typical brand campaign needs as much ad real estate as possible to convey the message. If the campaign is primarily banner-driven, think about some of the best practices creative agencies use to design effective campaigns:
- Keep key brand drivers persistent throughout ad frames.
- Keep the message simple.
- Get to the point right away, before the user scrolls your ad off the page or moves on to the next page.
These best practices are driven by the need to use ad space as effectively as possible. From a creative standpoint, if an advertiser wants to inject a call-to-action, it's likely going to take away from the effectiveness of the ad in terms of driving awareness and association.
But that's only one small reason why retrofitting DR objectives into brand campaigns is a bad idea. Remember what I said about the brand and DR online ecosystems earlier?
As a media planner, if I had $1 million to spend for a brand campaign, it's highly likely that the inventory I'm most interested in will be with premium sites. It will, 99 percent of the time, be purchased on a CPM basis. My CPM will likely be somewhere in the $5 to $15 range.
If I have the same $1 million to spend on a DR campaign, I would spend money very differently. Let's say we're talking about putting a campaign together to acquire new registrants for a CRM program. I might utilize a wide variety of pricing models, ranging from cost-per-click to cost-per-acquisition. I will likely cede some control of the ad environment to media partners in exchange for flexibility on pricing and registrant volume. I'll consider co-reg, outbound email, and a number of other tactics that wouldn't even be on my radar screen for a branding campaign.
In the end, a DR campaign is going to utilize a lot more online inventory than a branding campaign, and the agency is going to have a lot less control over where it shows up.
From a DNA perspective, brand campaigns and DR campaigns are worlds apart. That's why when advertiser objectives shift mid-campaign, agencies push back on their clients for trying to apply DR effectiveness metrics to campaigns that were originally designed to address brand goals. The two things are from completely different spheres.
Although it might result in more agency management costs, both to manage the media to an appropriate DR metric and to produce new creative, it usually makes more sense to re-plan a campaign if objectives change than to try to make an existing campaign service a different objective.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.
