Undoubtedly, there is no one thing that makes companies succeed with their marketing these days.
With so many media, touchpoints and ways to target customers, it is clearly a combination of things
that must be executed correctly to move the needle.
Finding the right media and having proper analytics to optimize this media are key, but at the end of the day, consumers have to be engaged
with the content you present to them.
Comprehensive analysis of 20 years and billions in ad spend have shown that the creative can be two-thirds of the determinant of success of campaigns. In
other words, creative matters.
This may seem like a remedial statement, but in many ways creative gets overlooked in the process.
So many conversations with clients include talk about
just getting their product in front of their target demo, and it will surely be successful, as if exposure is the only thing they need to sell millions of dollars' worth of their product. If it only
were that simple.
There is a philosophical principle called Occam's razor that has been applied across science, reasoning, math and even politics. It states that the simplest explanation is
usually the best one. So, if it looks like a duck, swims luck a duck and quacks like a duck, it's most likely a duck.
The razor means that you can shave away the unlikely explanations and
hypotheticals to arrive at the correct answer.
The critics of Occam's razor state that the principle is an oversimplification of the complexities of real life and often rules out creative
thinking.
It would seem that creative and this principle are at odds, but there is an application that allows brands to win at performance marketing: ROI's razor.
This principle is
that with all things considered in the equation of successful performance marketing, at the end of the day, the best creative wins.
This could also be stated as the best story wins or
the best demonstration wins.
This is not to say that you ignore media targeting and analytics, but at the core, you must make sure your creative and messaging is the foundation that all other
things are built upon.
Without this foundation, you are left with more questions than answers, and likely performance marketing that does not perform.
Occam's razor is grounded in the
idea of parsimony -- being thrifty with your resources. This is another connection to performance marketing and making sure that
efficiency is key.
You can be smart with your budget when working with the right people to develop the winning creative. This likely means not working with your brand AOR that is not focused
on efficiency, nor does it mean allocating insufficient budget to develop the creative content.
ROI's razor also calls for the re-investment of revenues from direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales and
performance-marketing efforts into ongoing, scalable media spends.
These revenues can in many cases pay for the ongoing media campaign or at least act as a substantial subsidy of the media
spend, thus turning a larger “gross” media spend into much smaller “net” media spend. This larger media spend is the rising tide that lifts all ships, including traditional
retail sales, ecommerce partner sales and certainly Amazon sales.
None of this may seem revolutionary, but it should act as a reminder for all marketers as we strive to find success in the
ever-changing advertising world.
Hopefully, ROI's razor can be a principle we apply as we incorporate all the data that is available to us when we develop campaigns for clients. Shave away all
the hypotheticals, shiny objects and marketing fads that may seem like all the rage at that moment.
Focus on the creative, the messaging and the content -- and you can win at performance
marketing.