Maximize Your Media Dollars In 2014
By Mike Molnar, MediaPost
- Has my creative process changed to accommodate my increased spend in digital, social, mobile and native media spend?
- Are we providing the quality ad experiences that our audience expects from us and are we letting our metrics make us smarter?
- Why am I always told that digital and rich media ideas cannot be executed due to time constraints?
Are you asking these questions? Do you feel your digital campaigns are more about reach and fall short of delivering the engaging impact that you want to deliver and your audience expects? There’s a simple fix. And it will make you want to change the way you develop your campaigns forever.
With so many media channels to consider today — print, web, mobile, social, on-air, outdoor, native — competition for media dollars has never been more competitive across channels. As these new opportunities have exploded, many networks are still wired to spend their time perfecting a piece of key art rather than executing integrated campaigns. Spending weeks or months honing a media plan and static piece of key art without discussion from the very beginning about how the concept lives across multiple channels is the problem. And it’s easily fixable.
Here are a few ways to create transparency and efficiency to get the most success from your millions of media impressions in 2014:
1. Level the playing field.
Get all parties — print, digital, social and media — briefed and to the table early for a kickoff discussion. The resulting ideas from early and collaborative planning will all be built on an understanding that concepts will work across all media channels. Ideas are then created to engage audiences where they are in more meaningful ways.
2. Media and creative must talk. Demand it.
Media buyers buy audiences. Creative teams engage those audiences. That’s the marriage and how it should work. For instance, your digital creative team, if involved from the start, will provide your media buying team with specific inventory asks for their media RFPs based on their ideas. Creatives will know what type of inventory they need in order to execute big, impactful ideas, and can often get publishers and vendors to work with them if this is done before the media I/O is signed. Publishers typically accommodate creative asks as part of the negotiation process, but are not as quick to accommodate once an I/O has been signed.
3. Embrace a connected culture to engage a connected audience.
If the first two points above have been employed, then we’ve reached a workflow where all parties have developed an idea with a full understanding of how the concept will exist in print and how it translates to digital banners and outdoor billboards; how the billboards will translate to an over-the-page digital execution; how that on-air spot can live online with an engagement tactic added; and how rich media can help drive a corresponding social effort. This workflow is now efficient, clear and allows all parties to work toward a common goal, where no one party is idle waiting for another, and each supports the other. Key benefit: more time for creative tweaks, and more importantly time for testing those big high impact digital rich media placements.
I promise that if you take these three points into consideration, then you’ve laid the groundwork for a well-constructed reach campaign that enables maximum impact to increase awareness and allow for more meaningful brand engagement experiences.
The time is now to fully embrace an approach that creates efficiency, transparency, and ultimately — measurable success. The time is now to make 2014 the year that your campaigns scale successfully across this increasingly fragmented landscape.
Source
"Maximize Your Media Dollars In 2014." Mike Molnar. MediaPost, 02/06/14.