Show Notes
- Campaigns are big ideas constrained to a specific time period.
- A program is the intersection of a defined objective for a defined audience with no definitive end date.
- Campaigns use a pre-determined timeframe, either running creative long past its effectiveness or stopping too early.
- Programs plan for creative changes when needed and are responsive to market engagement.
- Lessons learned from the last campaign are often thrown away because they are not applicable to the next one.
- Programs allow you to build up knowledge over time based on what messaging works best and what media channels deliver most efficiently.
- Check out these blogs for reference:
Charity of the Week:
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The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing Podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Robinson, and with me, as always, is the charming conversationalist, Elizabeth Earin. Elizabeth, how are you doing today?
Elizabeth Earin: I am good, Steve. How are you?
Steve Robinson: I’m doing great. I have been chastised lately because I have not seen the new Star Wars movie yet.
Elizabeth Earin: Are you a big Star Wars fan?
Steve Robinson: I wouldn’t say that I’m a fan, but I’m definitely not a non-fan either. I think I really, really appreciate it and I want the opportunity to see it with a clear head and plenty of time and not feel like I am rushed, and not worry about babysitters, and these ideal conditions that I don’t think are ever going to happen.
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, you are putting a lot of thought into going to movies, although I shouldn’t say anything because I do — have already scheduled a babysitter for a movie that doesn’t come out until the end of July, so I should probably keep my comments to myself at this point.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, it’s the question – the conversation is is a movie actually babysitter-worthy, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Um-hmm. Well, and the tickets and the popcorn and it suddenly becomes a very, very expensive date night.
Steve Robinson: It becomes an investment.
Elizabeth Earin: It does, it does.
Steve Robinson: So what are we talking about today if we aren’t talking about Star Wars because I haven’t seen it?
Elizabeth Earin: Today, we are talking about campaigns and specifically what’s so wrong about campaigns. We talk about this a lot and that you should get rid of your campaigns and replace them with programs, and so today, we are kind of going to dive into why that is and really what the difference between a campaign and a program is.
Steve Robinson: I suppose we cannot continue to be ranting about the evils of campaigns if we don’t explain why.
Elizabeth Earin: Yes.
Steve Robinson: So when we get into that – before we get into that, I think we should probably explain what a campaign is versus what a program is, because when we say campaigns are evil or bad, we are really putting them in the contrast of a program, a marketing program which is the term we like to use, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Uh-hmm. And I know we are talking about vocabulary here, but I think to your point, it’s important to define it. So when we talk about campaign, I think it’s the traditional campaign that most of us are used to hearing when we talk about with our agencies and with our creative teams, but it’s that big idea that gets constrained to a very specific time period.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. It’s not like there aren’t objectives behind this big idea or an audience in mind behind this big idea, but usually it’s a theme or an idea around which a variety of strategies or tactics are attached to, right?
Elizabeth Earin: And it’s one of those ideas where, once it gets rolling and it gets the momentum behind them, it’s hard to stop and it’s hard to make adjustments.
Steve Robinson: That said, a campaign does usually have a fixed start and end date, so it has a kick-off, it usually goes big, and then at some point, it’s defined that all the media shuts off and everything supporting this ends, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Yep. And it’s usually replaced by another campaign.
Steve Robinson: And so contrast that with what we call a marketing program. And a marketing program is a similar but very different animal, right?
Elizabeth Earin: And a program is – It’s funny because we had – When we were talking about this, we had to kind of take a step back and think about the fact that we had never actually clearly defined what a campaign was and put a definition behind it. And so through the course of our conversation, what we came to conclude was that a program is an intersection of a defined objective for a defined audience with no definitive end date or end period in sight.
Steve Robinson: Right. So it’s ongoing, it’s never ending and it ends when it ceases to be effective, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Uh-hmm.
Steve Robinson: And then it’s targeting a particular group of people, a particular target audience, and that can change whether you are – depending on how you have structured your business. So for our B2C clients, when are working with somebody who is B2C, usually we are going to define a program around a given persona because there you are going to have a lot of strategies and tactics that will probably support each other around getting that particular persona all the way through the buyer’s journey to being a customer and then beyond, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Uh-hmm.
Steve Robinson: And then on the B2B side, we usually – that’s where things get different depending on how your business slices and dices your audience and where you are going to combine your strategies and tactics. Sometimes a program for a B2B audience will be based on an industry, or again based on a persona, or it may even be based on some combination thereof or some group of target accounts.
Elizabeth Earin: So our program, again, is a defined objective for a defined audience without a specific time frame in mind. There’s no definitive end period, whereas that campaign is that big idea that has a very specific time period. So with that being said, what is it about campaigns that are –
Steve Robinson: That makes them evil?
Elizabeth Earin: So bad, yeah, I mean really what are we talking about? Why is it that we in Iterative Marketing are so against campaigns?
Steve Robinson: Well, I think one of the big things is – there are a lot of things about campaigns that are inherently wasteful, and if there’s one thing that drives me nuts, it’s waste, right? And the biggest space that I see waste is in this whole timeboxing concept, because a campaign has a fixed start and an end date, and how do you know before you get in there what that end date should be? You are really just sort of guessing or running off of past experience on other campaigns which were entirely different around a different audience. It’s a different idea and a different objective, so that end date is kind of a gut feeling or based on budget that always leaves something on the table, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Uh-hmm.
Steve Robinson: In some cases, what it leaves on the table is that that campaign could have run longer. In other words, you yanked it because that’s when the end date was, that’s when we ran out of media budget, that’s when it ends. And in reality, it would have been effective for another week, another month, maybe even indefinitely because your audience is constantly churning and changing. And so you didn’t even have to change creative. You could have just run that much longer, but you weren’t measuring it to know what it needed to end. Sometimes it’s cut far too late, and now you are running media that isn’t effective. You are running messages in media that are not doing anything except for maybe really annoying the people who have seen it six times, right?
Elizabeth Earin: It’s easy and it’s hard. Campaigns fit into the corporate world very, very well and easily because it’s – again, you have got those clear times that it’s running so you can inform everybody what’s going on. Everyone’s on the same page. They know when it’s going to stop, but you don’t necessarily have those checks and balances to make sure that what you are doing is effective. And so that’s where it’s a little bit counterintuitive and that’s why programs make a little bit more sense in that sense of it.
Steve Robinson: Right, and in a program, you still have the latitude to change creative when a creative has run its course, but you keep the bones roughly the same so that the structure, the organization of the marketing program is going to remain the same and be consistent through its entire indefinite duration.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think that’s a really important point because we are not advocating here that you take creative and you run it forever and ever and ever and ever. No, you are running it until it doesn’t make sense to run anymore and then you are replacing that with the appropriate creative that you have improved upon based on what you have learned from your program that was running previously.
Steve Robinson: While we are on the topic of what you learned while your program was running previously, I think that’s a great segue into the second thing that really irks us about campaigns and that is a lack of repeatability. When you are executing a campaign, chances are that this particular big idea, this hook, this method of reeling in the audience is going to be very different from the last one. The more different it is, the easier it is to sell and the more exciting it is as you are starting to kick it off, so there’s a goal to be as creative as possible. And in doing so, you are doing everything for the first time and you are constantly re-inventing the wheel. And when you contrast that with a program, a program ends up being — again, your mechanisms, your core strategies are going to stay the same or are going to be improved upon incrementally and you are not throwing the baby out with the bathwater and starting over from scratch each time. So you are able to take the time to refine and grow and you are not doing things for the first time all the time.
Elizabeth Earin: And this is one of those things. I love campaigns – I don’t love campaigns. I love programs. But where I think programs really make sense for both corporate marketers and for agencies, as an agency, you are constantly trying to come up with a new big idea that’s going to impress your client. And as a corporate marketer as the client, you are wanting to stay top of mind and be relevant. And so you are in this constant struggle to always have something new in the pipeline. And what’s nice about moving from campaigns to programs is that you get to break that up a little bit. And so you are not constantly looking for this new big flashy idea. Instead, you are looking for the best possible way to serve your audience.
Steve Robinson: And you are not walking – on the brand side, on the corporate side, you are not walking into the CEO’s office hoping that the next big idea that you are pitching is going to resonate with him, right? Because now it’s all based on metrics. It’s based on repeatability and you are getting out of that pitch cycle internally just as much as the agency is getting out of the pitch cycle when engaging with the brand.
Elizabeth Earin: Definitely. So one of the other reasons that campaigns are evil — we are attacking campaigns here and we love programs so much — is the ability to apply what we have learned. And when we are working with a campaign, any lessons that we have learned from that campaign, they get thrown out because they are not necessarily applicable to whatever that next campaign may be or the next four campaigns may be. Nor are there any benchmarks for performance metrics. When we take a look on the program side, we are able to build that knowledge up over time on what messaging works best and what media channels work best and which ones are most efficient in delivering your message to the right people at the right time. And we are able to, again, measure that over time and see where we have made improvements, but we are also able to learn from the insights that we have gleaned and apply that to the program moving forward.
Steve Robinson: Exactly. I mean, one of the core tenets of the optimization components of Iterative Marketing is to limit the number of changes, limit when you are changing as you are iterating and improving. And in a campaign arena, you are not limiting your changes. You are changing everything all at once when you swap campaigns, whereas with a program, you are limiting those changes. You know exactly which changes resulted in a more favorable outcome versus the other ones. And so it really has the ability to take those lessons and those insights and apply them back, knowing exactly what had the positive impact and what had perhaps even a detrimental impact.
Elizabeth Earin: I think that’s a great point.
Steve Robinson: And that’s actually a great segue right into our next kind of minor annoyance here. Major annoyance of campaigns is a lack of responsiveness. Campaigns fit snugly into the budget, right? Maybe you have got one, two, three, four campaigns that fit within your budget year and you are able to allocate your budget accordingly to each one of those campaigns. And usually you work with your agency or your internal teams, your creative teams, to go and structure out a campaign to fit the budget and then rarely is there any money set aside or any resources or even time set aside to be responsive to either, (a) what you don’t know going in because you have to make a lot of assumptions coming into a brand new big idea or, (b) changes in the market place. A lot of times, these campaigns are planned up to a year in advance and the market can change much more rapidly, particularly today with global competition and digital connectiveness and the ability for other brands, particularly smaller ones to be very nimble.
Elizabeth Earin: And so programs give us that ability to remain nimble and actually have built into them a plan to make changes and to update the program. And so that’s where we see better efficiency when we are talking about programs versus campaigns.
Steve Robinson: I think there’s also a topic here on incentives. When you look at the incentives that get set up with a campaign versus a program, an unfortunate situation arises in the campaign camp in that I feel that marketers are actually dis-incentivized to measure.
Elizabeth Earin: Why would you? I mean you have already convinced someone to spend all the money, so why do you want to go back and say, hey, thanks for giving me the blank check but it’s not working. It doesn’t make us look good as marketers.
Steve Robinson: Exactly, exactly. And really, all it can do is erode confidence and set up challenges for the next pitch, right? Whereas in a program, your goal instead is obviously to reach the objectives of the program, but it’s also to improve on your ability to reach those objectives. And in order to do that, you have to measure, and so part of your reporting becomes not just on how many MQLs or SQLs are we generating — those are Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads for those who aren’t familiar with the terms — or how much revenue are we generating, but also how much are we improving on our ability to accomplish those goals? How are we iterating and improving and increasing the efficiency of our program? And those are great metrics to tout so you are actually incentivised to do the measurements so that you can report on your incremental improvements and it totally flips the game, right?
Elizabeth Earin: And when you can show those incremental improvements, it’s easier to go back in and ask for more budget dollars or additional budget dollars, which leads us in kind of to the next little speed bump that we hit when we are talking about campaigns and that’s budget allocation. And so when we are talking about a campaign, we — because it’s a fixed — it’s one big idea. It’s over a fixed period of time. There’s not any room in there for any adaptations or any extensions and so that makes it a little bit complicated because, again, it’s that fixed time, whether the market is demanding it or not, whether your customers are showing their interest or not, it’s that fixed time. When we talk about programs on the other hand, we build programs and we allocate budget specifically for growth, for adaptation, for extension, so that if the program is working the way that we anticipate that it’s going to, we can continue it until it doesn’t make sense to continue it anymore.
Steve Robinson: Exactly, and if it turns out that it’s going well and there’s an opportunity to spend more money, you have that track record to come back to leadership and say, hey, I know that we only budgeted X number of dollars for this particular program, but if you look here, we have a track record of being able to produce this degree of revenue or this number of qualified leads based on this input and if we increase our span, we should be able to increase leads or revenue accordingly; can we get some more budget? And because you have that track record and you have been doing that measurement, it becomes easier to go back to the pot for more money if and/or when it makes business sense to do so.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think the final point — we are almost done beating up on campaigns here — but the final point comes down to demand and the consistency of demand. And when we talk about campaigns, we are seeing peaks and valleys in terms of demand generation. And this gets a little complicated when we are talking about some of the leads because we have got leads coming in at a different time and there’s a lot of inconsistencies there and that turns into a lot of problems. It’s not only for us but for our sales team as well.
Steve Robinson: And for the business to fulfill as well. If you are creating peaks and valleys in the amount of demand that you are generating, then that means that the business has to be able to respond to peaks and valleys, and valleys in the number of sales if it’s a physical good and the ability to onboard multiple clients at once if you are a services company. There’s lots of challenges in being able to ratchet up and then scale down your fulfillment if you have demand going up and down. If you are running a program and the program is just incrementally improving as it plods along, it’s a lot easier to make sure that you are able to fulfill on the demand that you are generating. I think that now is probably a good time for us to take a quick break and talk about how we can help some people. So, Elizabeth why don’t you do just that?
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I would like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor, and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by Tara Vandygriff of iHeartMedia in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Tara asks that you make a contribution to the Life Navigators, an organization that has been providing services and creating opportunities for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities for more than 65 years. Learn more at lifenavigators.org or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the “Share a Cause” button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And we are back. So, we spent the first half of this podcast just beating up horribly on campaigns here.
Elizabeth Earin: I think it was more than the first half. I think it was about the first three quarters, but that’s okay.
Steve Robinson: Okay, well, we spent way too long beating up on campaigns. We should probably talk about some extenuating circumstances where either a campaign or campaign-like program or some hybrid approach is really actually appropriate because the world doesn’t necessarily adapt to a program-centric marketing model easily. And so Elizabeth, what do you think is the primary use case for when you have to break from a pure program model?
Elizabeth Earin: I think there’s a couple of different scenarios and I think we are going to go through a couple of those now, but I think the first one that pops in is those one-off events and opportunities that are available to you. And that’s where it gets a little complicated because the whole idea of a program is that it’s continuous, but if you have a one-time event, continuous doesn’t necessarily make sense. And so if it truly is a one-time deal, then yes, it does have to be a campaign. And we recognize that there is a time and a place for campaigns, but typically even those one-off events, a lot of times are something that you can repeat because it becomes annual and becomes something that you are going to do again in the future. And so when you look at it in that mindset, you can turn that campaign into a program even if it’s one week this year and one week, next year, you can still build off of what you have built. So that next year, you are not reinventing the wheel, you are not coming back to one big idea, and you are able to learn from your experience from the previous year. And a great example of that is when we look at it either sponsorship opportunities or trade shows. A lot of times, companies, once they have a sponsorship opportunity, that’s something that they maintain and they continue to follow through every single year, and same with trade shows. If you participate in industry tradeshows, then there’s a good chance that either in the next quarter or the next year, that you are going to participate in that same tradeshow and that’s where we have the opportunity to turn these one-time events into repeatable programs.
Steve Robinson: Exactly. I mean if you are a contractor, you are participating in a home remodeling show and there’s a spring show and a fall show, and you can follow the same repeatable process for each show. And well, if you have – in that case, you are probably going to have different audience at each show, so you could even maintain the exact same creative and probably get away with it, allowing yourself to incrementally improve that creative based on feedback every single show. Now there are instances where maybe you are talking to a more captive audience, where you are going to get the same people over and over again, where you don’t have the luxury of being able to reuse creative but at least you can keep the structure, the strategies and the tactics all the same over and over again and incrementally improve upon those as much as your creative might be changing out.
Elizabeth Earin: So your creative would change but your channels and your process would stay consistent from show to show or from event to event.
Steve Robinson: Exactly, exactly. I see the same thing coming up with seasonality. If you are B2C, you have the holiday cycle that you have to work within, right? And that can mean that you are going to have to make adaptations for that particular holiday cycle, but again, this could be an instance of taking a program that works in the off-season, simply making sure the creative is relevant and then increasing the amount of spend to make sure that you are breaking through any noise or clutter. The same thing could be true if, say, you are in insurance. While you have an open enrollment period for health insurance, so you are going to have to make sure that you are appropriately advertising during that time period in order to break through the clutter and noise of your competition.
Elizabeth Earin: And the seasonality extends beyond just holiday promotions, and I think a great example of this is a lawn care company. Their business is dictated by the weather, but each year it’s the same process. In spring, you are getting ready to plant and you have got the yard cleanup and getting things ready there and getting the sprinkler set back up and making sure everything’s working. And then the maintenance through summer, and then when you get into fall, you have got clean up and winterizing or at least you do if you live somewhere that has winter. Our listeners in California and Florida probably don’t know what we are talking about, but for those of us that do, this is the same process over and over. Each year, it’s the same. And even though you are talking to the same customers, their needs haven’t necessarily changed and so your message may not even need to change. And to the point that you can test which message best works, and so after a few seasons, you have really honed in on not only the content that’s resonating but the channels and the best way to deliver that content to them.
Steve Robinson: I think another place that we have clients coming to us saying, well, we need a campaign for such and such is around product launches because they are so used to when they launch a new product or service that we are going to launch a new campaign to go and drive demand for that particular product or service. To some extent, doing something special for a new product launch might be — not only makes sense but actually be a requisite of the business because if you are turning up a new particular service or product, you might need to be able to ramp up demand very rapidly for that particular product or service or you are going to have a hard time fulfilling it because you can only produce. You have to have a minimum number of units you can produce in such and such, and now you have got a bunch of stuff sitting in a warehouse if you don’t ramp up demand to match your supply. And in those instances, what we generally recommend is if you have been doing programs instead of campaigns all along, chances are you have an existing program that is focused on reaching that same audience that this product is perfect for, right? And your objective behind that particular program has probably been to drive sales of similar products or services. So now you just have an opportunity to make sure that the creative aligns with that particular product launch and that you have adequate budget in order to get over that hump of generating that initial demand. And so it becomes taking an existing program and just cranking up the volume and swapping the creative in order to achieve your objectives. Where it gets a little different is if you don’t have an existing program running.
Elizabeth Earin: And if you don’t have a program, then you are going to need to set up – you are getting to need to set one up and then you are going to have to start big instead of small which kind of goes against some of our Iterative Marketing ideology here, but to meet your goals, you need to ramp up. I think the key here is that it’s this hybrid approach that Steve mentioned and it’s really taking some of the things that make programs so successful and so effective and applying those to this campaign thinking to try and get the most that we can out of the money that we are spending.
Steve Robinson: Exactly. So how does this apply to traditional media? Because a lot of what we talked about is very digitally centric.
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, and I think that’s a really great question and one that we get asked quite frequently. And it does start with digital and kind of using digital, as you like to say, that canary in the coal mine to get an idea when your creative starts getting stale. We have got such easy ways that we can track this in digital and we don’t have those in traditional. And so we can use what we are learning through digital to then apply that across our traditional channels. And so that becomes a really great opportunity to again find out when it is that that content is getting stale.
Steve Robinson: And I don’t think it’s not just learning when your creative gets stale because that’s certainly part of it, but you can also use your digital to learn which messages you should be using on traditional as well. So as you iterate and improve your messaging in the digital channel, you now take that and you carry that over to the traditional channel. So now you have digital and traditional channels supporting the same program, but your learning occurs primarily on the digital side, your application occurs across both.
Elizabeth Earin: That is a great point. Thanks, Steve.
Steve Robinson: One of the challenges that we see when we are working with clients that are trying to use both traditional and digital channels within a given program is that – I should say challenges when they are trying to convert a campaign into a program is traditional media is often flighted, and by flight it means that it shuts off and turns back on, right? So you are not staying in market consistently. One of the keys to a successful program is maintaining a consistent presence, so when we make a change, we know that the change in results is due to the change that we made in any other content or media. If you are flighting, then you never really know because you are pulling messages in and out of market and you are turning channels on and off. The problem with just saying, well, okay, we will just stop flighting, we will just keep content out there for forever and we’ll just change our creative, and we will keep that channel on. The problem with that becomes budget, because if you are doing anything that’s mass media, the idea of running continuously become — with any reasonable frequency if you are advertising becomes challenging. And so sometimes when you move from a campaign thinking over to program thinking, it means changing up your media buys and maybe buying less expensive media that it becomes possible to stay in market consistently and not be forced to flight.
Elizabeth Earin: And finally, it’s taking a look at where we have opportunities to measure our traditional media. I mentioned earlier it’s easier to do that with digital but that’s not – it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to do it with traditional. And the way that we do that, the way we get around that not having that instantaneous clicks and being able to measure engagements and that sort of thing is we use unique calls to action for measurement whenever possible. And so this can include vanity URLs, special phone numbers that have been created that can track specifically who is calling from that ad. There’s a variety of different tactics that can be used to measure response to a traditional media ad.
Steve Robinson: I think that kind of wraps it up this week. We have beaten up campaigns enough for a day, but I want to thank everybody for making time for us today and encourage everyone to join us next week when we’ll be talking about See, Think, Do. Until then, onward and upward.
If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio, Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then onward and upward!
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