Georgia Phillips is COO, Luma Research. This article appeared in the AdNews magazine. Subscribe here to make sure you get your copy.
Making a great ad is not easy. Only around a third of ads work - so think of all that money and time that is wasted making sub-standard ads.
In the past it didn’t matter so much. Budgets were big, marketing managers were led by their gut and campaigns weren’t as easy to measure.
But the world has changed. It started with the GFC and has been amplified by COVID. Every marketing move now needs to be measured, quantified and scrutinised. Budgets are low and everyone is required to do more with less. If we can’t get the ROI we need, we could lose our budget or worse, our jobs.
This has placed a huge amount of pressure on creative agencies to pull an ‘advertising rabbit out of a hat’ and with minimal time and cost. It is near impossible.
So what are some of the things we can do to help with the process? Here are four fast facts to help:
A good brief
The best ads are those that have a clear and tight brief. If the agency is going to make an ad which moves the dial for the brand, they need to know what is required. All too often we see communication briefs that just say ‘to build sales’ but have little insight into how or why. If you don’t know what your ad is trying to say or do, should you really be advertising?
Find the Human truth / insight
We see the best ads are the ones which are based around a real insight or human truth. They address a pain point or communicate something about the brand which everyone can relate to. Often the insights in creative briefs are just facts or anecdotes, but what we really need to do is puzzle our way through a few sources of data or observation to get to an underlying behaviour or belief to underpin our creative idea. This is the lynch pin which holds it all together – if we get this right, everything else falls into place to ensure our ad will be relevant to our consumers.
Right message, right creative and right media
For many clients and agencies, a lot of effort is put into the creative concept, but little focus is given to the messaging and how this might ladder across the campaign and channels. If you start with addressing the human truth, this part will fall into place more easily. But the main thing to consider is will your message be motivating and relevant to your consumers? If you have a rational message, ensure that what you have to say is something that your audience cares about. What are the key drivers for your brand? Lean into that and be clear and single-minded about it. And if your message is something you think is important, but is not of high relevance to consumers yet, your ad will need to demonstrate why they should care.
Time to think, plan, test and learn
Many clients we work with these days have a lot of pressure on them to work with tight budget, impossible goals and limited time frames. The average lead time for ad development used to be 6-9 months. Now, for many, it seems to be 6-9 weeks. It makes it really difficult to have time to think through the strategy, insight and planning with these pressures attached. It is also rare that the first creative idea will be the best one. We see that often the best ideas come from an iterative process of development and test & learn. This can’t happen if we only give our creatives a few days to achieve this. We need to start our planning sooner and give everyone the space and time to get it right.
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