Earlier this week, I went up to New York City to show our rough cuts to our client. For someone in the marketing industry, this is a pretty standard process in ANY campaign. That being said, I don’t know how many people from the industry are actually reading this blog, so I thought it might be a fun to give everyone some insight into what takes place when dealing with an outreach marketing campaign.
Now, I could go over the whole campaign, beginning to end. I could go over the strategic planning for our media plan, the internal logistics of our day to day operations, or the process our PR goes through when pitching a story to the media. That would be very informative but let’s be honest, the most fun part of any marketing campaign is what you see on TV, a newspaper, the internet; the CREATIVE.
First, let me set it up a bit. You see, the agency I work for a multicultural agency that is specialized in reaching out to smaller, “emerging” (Middle Eastern, South & Central Asian, Eastern European) ethnic audiences. The client is a large government agency looking to reach out to the wide range of demographics that make up the whole of the United States. It is my agency’s responsibility to not only reach out and disseminate information to six different “emerging” language audiences nationwide, but develop the creative concepts for these language groups as well.
We started a couple of years back, when we came up with and tested three different tag lines. We used focus groups to test these tag lines and we were lucky enough to come out with one, clear cut winner. In some cases, coming up with a tag line can be a lengthy process and we were lucky to avoid that. We then went to the drawing board, came up with different ad concepts to reach out to these audiences, showed them to the client for approval, and tested them against each other in copy testing focus groups. For this first round of copy testing, we showed four different TV commercial concepts in video story board format and four different print ad concepts with place holder images.
We then came back with the audience’s feedback, made the necessary adjustments and showed our client’s stake holder’s the original creative concepts with our proposed revisions. Showing the creative to the campaigns stakeholders is an important part of the process. Stakeholders hold influence in companies, agencies, and even in marketing campaigns. Keeping the stakeholders informed and pleased is an important part of the creative process and though one must be mindful of adhering to all of the stakeholder’s advice, one should always include what they can in the creative while staying true to the integrity of the work. In our case, though we appreciated all and included some of the stakeholder’s feedback, we needed to keep in mind what is best for our audience and in turn, the outcome of the campaign. With their feedback included, we then went out for a second round of copy testing where this time we showed four radio commercial concepts (voice over’s with sample music created from TV concepts) and eight total print ad concepts (four older revised against four new concepts).
With all the feedback collected, we then had to choose which creative concepts we would move forward with and what adjustments would be made to the creative to make them more effective and allow for the best possible results on this the campaign. We then took our final decisions to the client, showed them our ideas and received their approval.
Up next, PRODUCTION .
