With 2020 well underway, it’s a natural time to reflect on your brand value. You’re likely busy recrafting ad campaigns, content and preparing new messages to deliver to the market. During this exciting and often hectic time, it’s critical to keep in mind what hasn’t worked with audiences in the past.
Every year there is at least a brand or two that ends up pushing out misinformed creative, insensitive imagery and tone-deaf messaging. These ads-gone-wrong leave us scratching our collective heads, wondering how certain campaigns made it out of the planning stages, never mind past executive approvals.
Without the right processes in place, any brand can sabotage its equity in an instant. Here are three steps you can take to ensure your campaigns hit the right note and serve your brand in the long run.
Put ideation at the heart of campaign creation
Involve all stakeholders in the ideation phase to build a community of collaboration among your team. By doing so, you’ll cultivate an environment that exudes a diverse range of thoughts before any content is deployed into the market.
Finally, transparency is key to ensuring the right people see the creative before it’s too late to make corrections.
Use technology to create a competitive landscape
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is an adage that still holds true. Making a small tech investment now is much less costly than a PR nightmare or talent rights fines later. By utilizing advanced tech platforms, you can create a gap between you and your competitors. If done properly, that gap will continue to widen, and your brand equity will begin to soar.
A good content management and delivery platform can make all the difference. Before investing in a platform, there are a few things to be aware of. First, brand equity relies on speed. A click of a button should be all that’s required to send files to their destination fast—regardless of media channel. Make sure your content management platform has quick access to a wide range of media destinations.
Having data on demand is the second key factor. Smarter planning and decision-making only happen with the most accurate information, so a content management platform must provide a detailed, single source of truth. Look for a system that gives you a real-time overview of any and all data from creative to cross-media content delivery to campaign analytics and beyond.
Good tech should streamline and simplify the user experience. In our fast-paced digital world, your tech platforms should allow you to easily collaborate with partners and suppliers and simplify workflows. Adstream ONE enables you to create custom workflows, like assigning a media agency to place orders, or a post-house to upload content on your behalf.
The fourth and final element of any quality content management system is control. When all eyes are on you, there’s no room for mistakes. You need to ensure that all assets uphold your brand’s image and value in the marketplace. The ability to understand what has been sent, delivered and what’s still sitting in the pipeline is crucial.
To complete the picture, ONE Social, coming soon, is our social media tool with publish and unpublishing capabilities that provides control over your social content and talent rights across all assets.
Don’t drift from a consistent message
In advertising, the word consistent is not necessarily sexy, but its importance cannot be overlooked. Brands that don’t understand their direction will lose confidence in the marketplace and decrease their brand equity.
That is to say the messaging, global or local market presence and various media channels used should help a brand achieve consistency and form a bond with its audience. Failure to develop this could jeopardize even the strongest creative concepts and worst of all, undo months of hard work.
Adstream ONE is the world’s most powerful TV and cross-media advertising delivery platform. It ensures brands and agencies can manage, deliver and report on campaign assets at scale and pace to over 80,000 destinations worldwide with absolute confidence.
—
Trevor Williams is the global marketing director for Adstream where he is paving the way for continued digital transformation in a highly competitive industry. Before joining Adstream, he did marketing at Samsung.
