Campaign Development
Campaign development is the process of taking an objective and producing the campaign that achieves it: the message, the creative, the audiences, the channels, and the measurement. Most development effort goes to the visible layers, the assets and the media plan, because those are what get reviewed in meetings. The layer that determines performance is the message: what the campaign says to the prospect about their problem and your offer. Campaigns are often rebuilt at the asset layer when the defect is in the message layer, and performance does not change.
How it actually works
Development typically starts from an asset brief: formats, channels, flight dates, budget. The message is inherited from existing brand language and treated as settled. Optimization then iterates the variables the platform exposes, new cuts, new audiences, new bids, while the variable with the most leverage is never included in the test plan.
Message-first development reverses the order. It starts from what the target market needs to hear, grounded in their stage of awareness and their own language, and tests candidate messages cheaply before any production or media commitment. Assets, audiences, and channels are then built to carry the winning message.
Message-first development also changes the economics of optimization. Message tests are inexpensive relative to production, so more candidates can be tested before commitment, and a proven message raises the return on every asset and placement built after it. The decision rule is an option calculation: run the test whenever its cost is below the production cost multiplied by the probability the concept fails, because the test buys the right to abandon a losing concept before the production money is committed. Since production budgets and the spread of possible outcomes both grow with campaign size, the value of testing first rises as budgets rise. Platform-level optimization then tunes a campaign whose central variable has already been settled.
In practice
At Potbelly, spend became five times more efficient at level budget with no change to the videos, the images, or the audiences. The message was the variable that changed. After efficiency was proven, budget scaled, and revenue grew 30% and then 19% year over year.
Where we come in
We develop campaigns message-first: candidate messages grounded in the customer's stage of awareness and tested small before production or media scale. A claim not backed by data from within the target market does not ship. The same sequence ran through the MrCool engagement, and one consumer-product client's acquisition cost fell from $52 to $13.50.
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Related terms
- Message
- What the campaign says to the prospect: the problem it names, the claim it makes, the reason to act. The highest-leverage variable in the campaign, and the least tested.
- Creative asset
- The video, image, or copy that carries the message in market.
- Audience targeting
- Who the campaign reaches. The right audience served the wrong message does not convert.
- Stages of awareness
- Schwartz's model of what the prospect already knows about their problem and your solution. The message has to meet the stage; a solution-stage message served to a prospect unaware of the problem does not register.
- Message-market fit
- Evidence that a specific message moves a specific market's behavior. Established by small tests, and the precondition for scaling anything.
- Flight
- The scheduled run of a campaign in market.