Campaigning - a passion for effectiveness

Campaigning - a passion for effectiveness

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  • Peter Metzinger
    Peter Metzinger    Premium Member   Group moderator
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    The Meaning of Context
    Today I had this thought about awards. When awards are given - e.g. about advertising campaigns - they are given for the creativity e.g. of the campaign ads. Or for oustanding design. But what does outstanding really mean? Our brain works in a way that it is permanenty looking for contrasts - motion where everything else is standing still. Colour where everything else is grey. Sound ehere evrything else is silent. It is a fact, that messages are perceived best when they are outstanding in the way just described. Extraordinary. That means, that you cannot judge about the quality of a campaign or its execution without seeing the context? Which leads me to the conclusion that the way campaigns get judged is wrong.
    • 28 Jan 2006, 11:56 am
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  • Peter Metzinger
    Peter Metzinger    Premium Member   Group moderator
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    Re^2: The Meaning of Context
    Hi Siân

    Thanks for kicking of the discussion. I refer to an earlier article in which I tried to explain the idea: https://www.openbc.com/cgi-bin/forum.fpl?op=showarticles&...

    Basically you can say it's an approach to change processes which I learned in NGOs like especially Greenpeace in the 1990s. It is an approach that builds upon the assumption that communication is not everything, that there are tools which are not primarily communication tools, but which sometimes can help you achieve your goals much faster or easier than through communication.

    Imagine you own a company. The sales are not as good as you'd like to have them. If now you hire an advertising agency to solve that problem, they will normally present you proposals for advertising campaigns. But perhaps the problem is not the advertising but the fact that your customer relationship is very inefficient because the internal communication does not work. And the reason for this lies in the organization itself - too many hierarchies or cultural patterns which are counterproductive. Then an advertising campaign can't achieve a lot. You have to apply organizational development tools and integrate them with the advertising activities.

    I know that in theory others have earlier come to the same conclusions. But nevertheless the whole communication business has not changed a lot. I therefore think we need a completely new approach, with a whole set of definitions that are in themselves logical and automatically avoid falling back into the old patterns.

    Is this still too abstract? I'm sorry, but I had a very busy day and tonight I'm not really capable of explaining it better.

    Kind regards
    ptr
    • 01 Mar 2006, 11:21 pm
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  • Peter Metzinger
    Peter Metzinger    Premium Member   Group moderator
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    Re^2: The Meaning of Context
    Dear Tobias

    You are rising very important questions which form the basis and touch the essence of campaigning and the discussions we have in our organization (pro:campaigning).

    Indeed, when you look at the world of advertising and PR you will find that not the effectiveness is what counts but the glamour. One of the reasons - in my opinion - is that most agencies try to avoid measurable goals as much as possible. Measurable goals mean that failure will be seen as good as success. With the awards only "success" will be seen, but not failure. On top of that the success of winning one of these awards is very questionable. In the end it is advertisers judge advertising campaigns. I have huge doubts that the audience would come to the samew conclusions and prize the same campaigns. This is one reason why I don't really care about these awards. They are meaningless if effectiveness and efficiency are what you care about.

    Effectiveness is defined as achieving your goals. To measure it you need measurable goals. Efficiency is effectiveness at the lowest possible costs / resource consumption.

    In Switzerland the bigger of the two advertising associations grants an award each year, called the "Effi"-price. Officially it is about efficiency. But they do not really divide effectiveness by the costs. Another award which is ont worth thinking about it.

    We had a discussion about awards during our last Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Munich, last April. We came to the conclusion that we would use the following apporach:

    Step 1: Did the campaign have professionally defined goals? (Here probably 95% of the campaigns would not reach step 2.) For "professionally defined" we would use the criteria defined in my book (Business Campaigning - Strategien für turbulente Märkte, knappe Budgets und grosse Wirkungen; Springer, Neuauflage 2006).
    Step 2: Did the campaign achieve its goals? (Another xy% would not fulfill this criteria)
    Step 3: Was the campaign set up as what we call "result oriented" opposite to "instrument oriented"?
    Step 4: How good was the underlying situation analysis? (For this we also have criteria)
    Step 5: How complete was the strategy?
    Step 6: How good was the execution?

    You see, if you want to award the best campaigns you need to do a lot of analysis first. This is where we stopped. Who would do that? We'd need good sponsors. But the discussion is not over yet. I hope that it will be continued next week at the AGM 2006, in Vienna. Due to a serious illness of my wife I won't be able to attendm, unfortunately.

    I'm looking forward to your reply.

    best regards
    ptr
    • 03 Mar 2006, 5:38 pm
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  • Peter Metzinger
    Peter Metzinger    Premium Member   Group moderator
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    Re^4: The Meaning of Context
    >if I get you right, the measurement of the completeness of the strategy is (besides the execution that can be measured by the achievement of the goals) the last analysis problem that is left open in your approach.

    No. Sorry, I expressed myself not clear enough. It is not an open gap in the approach. It is a practical problem. To assess a campaign strategy thoroughly requires almost as much resources as developing it. If an award jury needs to assess campaign strategies, the award becomes very expensive. The resources to pay for that is the gap. That is what I meant.

    >Unfortunately it is the biggest analysis problem, because to my opinion it stands at the center of the whole thing:
    >
    >The performance of campaigning/marketing actions and in effect the efficiency (and the effectiveness) of them depend first of all on how good you get to know your situation and then define your strategy according to your 1st level objectives (and the objectives/goals of all the other stakeholders of the campaign as customers, sponsors, etc.). Then you define your goals, then you choose the instruments and then you execute.

    Absolutely!

    >So if your strategy is incomplete or does not fit to the situation analysis or your objectives, the goals will be chosen false and also the instruments, the execution. And if well defined goals, instruments and execution don´t fit to the strategy you can still achieve these goals and the execution can still be good but they also don’t fit to the underlying situation, your objectives, visions, beliefs...
    >
    >Here are my suggestions: What about widening Step 3 (Was the campaign set up “result oriented” or “instrument oriented” and/or was is “strategy oriented/based”?)

    If a campaign strategy is not result-oriented it is also not strategy-oriented/based. Therefore it is not necessary to widen this question at this point.

    and of step 5 (How complete was the strategy and how did the goals, the execution and the instruments fit to it?).
    This is a good point. You are basically right, of course. It is not only the completeness of the strategy that is important, but also that the target-groups, instruments, guidelines, terrains, messages, organisation, resource-use etc. fit to the goals and to each other.

    Where I dont't agree here is the assumption that the goals have to fit to the strategy. In our understanding the strategy consists of: goals, target(-group)s, instruments, guidelines, terrains&messages, organisation, resources and statements about the identified SWOT and about the use of synergies and multiplyers. Therefore the goals cannot fit to the strategy, because they are at the core of it. But, as I said, it is possible that due to mistakes all these elements don't fit to each other as a whole. (You can find details on this in my book Business Campaigning (http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,1-40109-22...)

    >
    >Right now I have no idea what the criteria for well done and well elaborated “strategic conceptions” and their fit can be used, but maybe here the discussion can continue. And it should continue, because there are too many camapigns out there with strategies that are badly elaborated, non-conform to the 1st level objectives and the underlying situation analysis. And because they lack too often a strategic underlying the execution is more or less only instrument-driven and the results are therefore only narrowed to the abilities of the instruments. And although execution is important and reaching goals is important, they are not as effective and efficient as they could be with well done strategic planning and fit.

    Absolutely. That is one reason why we founded pro:campaigning and why we are preparing an international experience exchange meeting for campaigners.

    Best regards
    ptr
    • 14 Mar 2006, 7:57 pm