In a Campaign article last week, Rory Sutherland, the President of the IPA (the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising), stated that Advertising was no longer about convincing people to buy a product or service but manipulating people to do what you want them to do. It’s a frightening idea, but it’s also true. At least the premise behind it is. So this week’s mail isn’t about sites, but about campaigns. The mail may be verbose, but the premise is one that we all need to come to terms with if we are to continue to produce creative and intelligent work that continues to be effective.
For those traditionalists amongst you, here’s a nice site, that allows you to create a join the dots picture from photos. Well. We aim to please J
Enjoy
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It’s always nice to get recognition. And I think our creative team has been doing a good job of developing engaging and eye catching ads that cut through the clutter and make a difference in recruitment advertising. However, today’s Herts Police ‘Happy Slapping’ campaign is yesterday’s news. We can’t always be reliant on creative excellence to achieve the sort of results that our clients need. Some of it will be down to old-fashioned hard work.
One of the more contentious and poorly understood aspects of digital advertising is optimisation: the facility to be able to adapt and improve something while it is ongoing. In our case that ‘something’ is a campaign. Pre-web, the typical approach to advertising would be to launch a campaign, collate information during the campaign from a number of sources (e.g. customer interviews and questionnaires, organisational data and the BARB for TV ratings) and then spend time after the campaign evaluating all the data to determine whether the campaign was successful or not.
Only once all this information was collated and interpreted was an agency able to understand why the campaign was (or was not) successful and what they needed to do to improve it. Obviously that placed a huge amount of pressure on the companies and individuals conducting the research and we saw the resultant rise of research houses like Hall & Partners, alongside the increasing importance of Planning as a skillset within Advertising Agencies.
There are those in the industry (usually incredibly arrogant and facetious people) who tell you that you don’t need planning. That you get a gut feel as to whether a campaign is working or not. Me? I prefer to stack the odds in my favour. Hence optimisation.
It works like this. During the creative development process, we may come up with four or five ideas. Even once a creative route has been chosen, there may be numerous ways of delivering the message and visuals and we typically look to distil this down to a core essence. Without measurement or insight, we have to rely on the skill and expertise of our creative team to get this right. However, it may be that different creative routes work better for different audiences. We may be talking about nominal percentile differences here – clickthru rates of 0.7%, instead of the average 0.5% – but even such a small percentile difference can have a huge impact on a campaign. So why not build each of the creative routes up front, launch the campaign and then remove the creative that doesn’t perform during the campaign and replace it with the best performing creative? That is the premise of optimisation.
To explain this in numbers, imagine that a client gives you £30,000 to spend on media for a campaign. For that you negotiate two million impressions (it might be a poor rate, but I’m using it as an example!) If we know that once a candidate is on a site, 10% will go through to the application page and of those, 10% will apply. Assuming that everyone who applies completes the form and we also know that 40% of those who apply are offered jobs, the difference in cost per hire is impressive (I’ve outlined the calculations below). But you know this already.
Now imagine that we negotiate the same two million impression deal, but we want it split to cater for two different audiences. If we can adapt the creative message during the campaign to ensure that one segment achieves a click through rate of 0.7% and the other 0.8%, we can see that the Cost per Hire becomes even more impressive. In a world where cost effectiveness is critical, this subtle difference can make all the difference to our clients.
This is why we try to push metrics and measurement – adserving and tracking tools like Atlas (or for our US counterparts, Eyeblaster) and site tracking tools like Google Analytics and WebTrends. Because when correctly structured, they give us the information we need to make the subtle differences that matter to our clients. And in a world of procurement-led business introspection, that subtle difference can be all that stands between us and the rest. Or to be even more brutal, the dole queue.