1) A seat (and a voice) at the table
In its early years, digital was a tack-on, something you thought about after the campaign was developed and virtually all the media money was spent. Then you'd call in the digital folks -- whether on the client or the agency side -- and give them five days to slap together some banners and a schedule. In today's environment, in which many target audiences are spending a heckuvalot more time on Facebook than they are with Fox or Family Circle, it's clear that this approach needs to be revised.
Digital can play such a pivotal role for brands that its experts need to be sitting at the big people's table from the outset of planning. Why? Because we really should be involved in campaign development. Different campaign ideas can have very different relevance in an interactive environment. Digital can now be the starting point for a campaign, or the ending point, or the thread linking it all together. But truly taking advantage of the medium requires time to think and execute along with a concurrent development process.
2) A strategic mindset
Both agencies and clients often have highly strategic analog efforts, and then they assemble a potpourri of digital platforms and executions without considering what is best – strategically -- to reach and connect with a target. The fault here is absolutely on both sides. I'll be the first to note that we digital agency people have a habit of going straight to execution, in part because that is usually what has been demanded of us, and because time demands make people sloppy over time.
But when a client insists that there be as strategic an approach to digital efforts as for all other marketing efforts, we will all get far more out of our efforts and our careers. Clients need to demand a real examination of what target audiences are doing online, the likely times and places consumers will be open to brand messages, and whether deeper interaction with those banners might take a week longer to execute but deliver far stronger results.
I'm sure I will hear from both agencies and clients about this: "How dare you say we aren't strategic?" To which I can only respond: "Perhaps the point isn't about you." But just take one look at the blinky-blinky-click-now detritus that passes for creative online and you'll realize how many brand plans are fad-platform driven. See the point?
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