• by Kendall Allen , March 7, 2011

In a consumer-led, cross-platform, socially graphed, always-on environment, the conventions of "flight" and "campaign" are practically passé. They don't make sense as a frame of reference. The business-to-consumer dynamic is now entirely fluid and cannot be confined to the call and response around a given campaign.

Trite campaign orientation does today's marketing no favors -- but  we have a hard time letting it go. It shows up in panel discussions, decks, pitches and even classes. Sometimes highlighting the campaign is the easiest way to speak to basic media planning methodology or to show effective media or creative execution.

Yet we acknowledge that media is now always part of a greater marketing mix, and struggle to elevate our outlook.  In fact, I was thinking about the C word recently as it relates also to our new, more committed relationship to data. Everything about data's penetrating our business and marketing consciousness is at odds with the mere campaign. For example:

--    The data conversation no longer begins and ends with talk about goals. We used to chat and clarify business and marketing objectives, set our goals and metrics -- and then set up the right tracking and measurement scenario for gauging our performance. And then we'd report on our performance, more often than not with fairly raw data, barely dressed up with narrative and trend snapshots. Most of us got better about providing more meaningful reporting. That's when we began to realize the bigger picture and make changes to our workflow and our investments.
--    We now realize we need a confluence of factors, vs. a single one; research, measurement and targeting are critical to guiding our decision-making. So, as companies, organizations and agencies who care about such -- we are syndicating what we need; building analytics divisions to service those needs; and leasing, subscribing to or building the tools sets we need, more and more often as standard mode of operations. The companies who know what time it is, operationalize to seriously engage with data in a whole new way.
-- No longer waiting until it's time to establish "campaign metrics," we involve data earlier in our marketing engagements. We pull data into our conversation as early as the discovery phase and then throughout strategy and planning; channel planning and media mix development; creative development; and our ongoing (hopefully) informed re-iterated execution through application of new insights. The application is constant and non-linear.

So, just as we are trying to put into true practice our conviction that media is just a small part of the greater marketing mix -- so must we acknowledge that the campaign is a narrow, almost mechanical aspect of what we do.  As I listen to peers, listen on the floor at conferences and work with clients, I can't help but think that as our relationship with data is truly and finally institutionalized, we'll get to a better, more mature place over the next two years. That place is one where both art and science play their part -- but data is in the picture all day long

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