Brands Need to Think Ahead on Messaging

If we lived in that world where creative planning is longerrange at least at the level of communications strategy it would greatly improve advertising effectiveness because the media could be optimized for the creative even before the specific executions are thought ofFor example in the upfront the average brand does not know where the creative is going to go that far in advance so optimizing alignment with context cannot be achieved for the most important buy of the year The solution is to at least know what the creative strategy will be for the next 15 months during which the upfront buy will run in the last 12 of them That enables an average 18 to 28 increase in ROAS on the largest buy of the year as proven by the Nielsen NCS study A significant achievement that only requires a little more forward planning in terms of creative strategy How would that workThe brand knows its own image and may have some desire to bolster or add to some of the attributes within that brand image The brand may have evidence that audiences it would like to target eg competitive users moveable middle etc have certain values and those values would make sense to be added to or bolstered within the brand image The mechanism for moving this image change to actually occur starts with writing the creative brief and updating it with new knowledge all the time Ideally not on a checkthebox recurring schedule but as often as possible driven by continuous new data being converted to understanding by human minds No one campaign with its creative executions can fully accomplish a brand image shift so the likelihood is that the same set of image objectives will remain similar over a period of a couple of years at leastThe achievement of the objective of being able to align media to creative that doesnamp8217t exist yet requires a small set of motivating values which apply across all product and service categories because they are the immutable human behavior drivers Fortunately my work led to rigorously validating 15 motivational values human beings have which shift in relative importance to them over the course of their lives The work involved field experiments at scale and unintentionally validated Maslowamp8217s thinking but the empirical reality is more complex than in Maslowamp8217s visionIn order to make it easier to visualize how this taxonomy could be used letamp8217s look at some actual data Here is a brand analyzed in terms of 6 campaigns it ran across about a two year period using RMT technologyAs you can see twothirds of the campaigns subconsciously andor consciously transmitted the Power motivation However if Power were the major implied promise of the brand there were times it was missing More likely the creative brief and strategy did not intentionally specify any of these primal values to all human beingsThe RMT technology uses human content coding and in work with partner Semasio also uses AI content coding trained by the human content codingBrands ought to look long and hard at each one of the 15 Motivations to decide whether you have always wanted to be identified with that value or whether you would like to somehow earn that brand perception now or if that value is antithetical to your brand or realistically unachievable by the brand These are the 15 motives which cause human behaviorThe six campaigns may have been preorchestrated but at first glance appear to convey a large proportion of the values which appear in their ads almost randomly Probably the copywriters and art directors created metaphors to get across a specific brand attribute and the primal motives crept into the ads unintentionally as a result of their metaphor choicesIt would make more sense to have a researchdatadriven plan in advance for how specific values attributes could build one upon the other over a period containing multiple sets of creative executionsOnce you have decided on the messaging in terms of the values you wish to communicate over the next year or two you can also benefit by programmatically targeting people who are motivated by those same values RMTSemasio are already set up and doing this in the US and Canada and are rapidly rolling out to other markets buying made easy by Semasio RMT integrations with Trade Desk and 21 other major playersThe RMT lens of 15 values is about to be launched as part of the amp8220MRISimmons of Canadaamp8221 Vividata the Canadian nonprofit research and measurement agency used by almost every major buyside and sellside companyagency in the marketing field in Canada RMT and Vividata have built the RMT system into Vividata and created a selfserve dashboard for users to access analyses of the values relevant to segments of users of brands and media brands We will bring you some of the insights gained from this innovation by our good neighbor to the northSelfpublished at MediaVillage through the wwwAvrioB2Bcom platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Brands Need to Think Ahead on Messaging

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Bill Harvey

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Brands Need to Think Ahead on Messaging

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