While working for a membership institute in Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to create and implement a 5-year advertising campaign with The Butler Brothers and GSDM’s Roy Spence, both based in Texas. The campaign launched as the I Look Up campaign and has now evolved into the Build for Better campaign. Since that time, I have had several CEO’s ask me how we developed it, why we developed it and whether it would be the right move for their organizational brands.
Many lessons were learned from creating the campaign plan to selling the idea to leadership and to members of the Board of Directors across the country. Many modifications were made along the way, but the vision remained the same.
Here are my five lessons learned and tips to consider before launching an advertising campaign:
Determine what you are solving for: What is the issue or issues you hope to solve? Create a half-day working meeting with your executive leadership team to determine whether the issue is a short-term or long-term issue; what business approach you currently have to solve that issue and determine the revenue expenditure vis-a-vis anticipated return on investment. Decide on what measurements you will use to determine success or failure weekly, monthly and quarterly. Lastly, determine the failure point in advance so as to have stop gap mechanisms in place. For example, back-t0-back months of revenue loss combined with decreased engagement by primary markets/stakeholders.
Maintain your vision and adjust smartly. Establish the desired end goal and measurement metrics from the beginning. You can adjust how you get there, what tools you use and what audiences you reach but stay true to that initial vision. Many will freely offer their advice on your campaign – and it will differ widely – listen intently but be decisive and smart in choosing what advice to take onboard.
Never fear visibility. Creating any type of public facing campaign for an organization will raise the stakes for them both internally and externally. Such increased visibility will result in a lot of interest and a lot of conversation. What naturally follows on from that is criticism. The more public you are, the more critics you will face. Don’t fear the conversation and encourage direct engagement with those critics.
Even airtight launches falter. No matter how well you plan a launch, something will ultimately go wrong; in our case, an erroneous tweet. How did we recover? We jumped into the conversation created by the tweet and continued to reach out to those offended online and offline. And we kept the launch going. End result – we had new champions emerge and new potential partnerships (as well as more engagement with the campaign than planned).
Stand strong. It’s your campaign. If you do not believe in it through thick and thin, no one else will. That goes for the communications and marketing team, leadership and the organization as a whole. Believe in the product and communicate about it with one unified voice.
