Performance

What makes a campaign? The creative or the media?

by

Máté Takács

5 min read

January 10, 2022

These 3 principles and 3 new practices guided us as we pushed our boundaries while working on campaigns for SHARE NOW Hungary, overcoming the challenges posed by ingrained habits and siloed processes.

Designing successful digital campaigns is a combination of art and science. Collecting, processing, organizing and embedding enormous amounts of data. Producing wonderful campaign assets to activate brilliant creative ideas. This is what we all do every day. In different divisions or agencies, left to our own devices, uninterrupted by others. In our safe silos.

If you are on the media side, it’s always the excellent channel mix with super-segmented user targeting that delivers the results.

If you are responsible for the creative work, it is definitely the bold idea and its execution that brought success for the campaign.

The lofty principle about integration that we’ve heard many times:

If you can’t deliver art, your science doesn’t matter. If you don’t integrate science, your art is just selfish ostentation.

So true and completely catchy…however, it is often not applied in practice.

Perhaps we all agree that creative and media do not work without each other, yet if we take a look at common international practices, we see that in the vast majority of cases, these efforts remain separate at both the strategic and tactical levels.

The practice is that the creative assets are incidental inputs – if handed over in time – during the development of the media strategy.

The practice is that ​​the selected agency will only deal with the creative concept and production, the media will be bought by another partner, so it’s unnecessary to dive into the details of media usage.

The result seems familiar, doesn’t it?

Two well-developed strategies accomplished in different folders.

Two well-paid teams who had barely discussed their approach and ideas.

One campaign which could have performed better, and an entrenched, split evaluation that will never really determine the real reason for the success or failure of the campaign.

It was the media. Or the creative. As always.

Merging what was not meant to be separated

Whether we are thinking in terms of creative or media strategy, the way the objectives are defined, the market, the competitive environment and user research are integral to both workflows. Both teams think about the user journey and how the “most valuable consumer” or persona goes through it. And similarly, they both look for possibilities of how media or creative efforts can activate desired user behaviors.

Of course, the vocabulary is different and the output takes different forms from a creative and a media perspective. But since the basic components are the same, looking more closely it doesn’t seem impossible to work together to create an integrated campaign or ecosystem in which the components are organically linked.

There are core principles that should guide client, creative and media teams towards success and set the tone for everything else to do:

  1. Egos aside. It’s worth building on the fact that the goal is the same on the client, creative and media side: to build a commercially successful campaign.
    If each party sincerely keeps this goal in mind and puts it in front of all the others, then establishing the new way of collaboration is a smoother process.
  2. A series of yeses will take us somewhere. But a single no can halt the process. We need to say as many yeses as possible to opportunities for involving the other party. We need to spend much more time together completing and deciding on strategic tasks. Constantly interpreting information, planning and defining the next steps. Keep reminding the teams and participants that they are building something that none of them could build on their own.
  3. Failure should be welcomed. That doesn’t mean that we have to fail, but the possibility of mistakes and disputes must not frighten us. To make the cooperation successful, the partnership has to be safe, accepting and courageous.
    Not just for moments but continuously, as this process requires time and typically at least six months elapse between planning and the realization of the first results.

The first client for whom we were able to build a campaign upon these values in a full scale was Share Now.

They made the bold decision not to look for separate agencies to design siloed elements of communication, but to give Mito an undivided budget as a start. The allocation and most efficient way of spending have been developed and agreed with the involvement of all three parties (client marketing leadership and the agency’s creative and media teams). We gladly dove ourselves into it, because we knew we could build a solution taking advantage of our previous integrated planning experiences as well.

The success of the cooperation is demonstrated by the fact that based on joint decisions of the client and our teams we have been managing and reallocating resources with the same flexibility ever since to continuously maximize business impact.

The adjustments we made to establish a tangible integrated campaign

  1. Two strategists joined forces to work as one. They blended together the media and creative planning workflows. The most important aspects were to integrate processes, mindsets and cultures, which required mutual attention, strategic coordination of the assembled media and creative teams, and a constant willingness to change for the sake of co-creation.
  2. We were each other’s key clients. To be able to build coherent campaigns each month and during key communication periods, it became part of our routine to make sure that all the key findings and suggestions from the media and creative teams are validated by the other team before the solution is crafted or implemented. Under the leadership of the account teams, this became a natural process, replacing ingrained habits.
  3. Being utterly brutal about our impact and priorities. We had to create an evaluation system that clearly links the operation of the marketing ecosystem and its components to business results. And aside from our vanity, we had to accept every insight that puts the creative first over the media or vice versa, subordinating our own separate professional and business interests to the success of the campaign.

Share Now’s goal was to catch up with the two major car-sharing providers in the market as a third entrant. After working as their single integrated agency for 18 months now, by the end of the year we celebrated that with a significant contribution of communication efforts they had reached their highest acquisition numbers -significantly above the target set in their business plan- and closed the financially most successful quarter since entering the Hungarian market.

It was one of our biggest challenges to undertake this project, but the clear shared goals, transparent sharing of informations, the dedicated time together and the excellent attitude of the —not so long ago siloed— teams led to a steep increase in new user acquisitions and the number of monthly active users, proving that Art and Science work brilliantly together.

And it depends primarily on the principles we establish, the people we collaborate with and their willingness to selflessly change and adapt.

We are always happy to consult on how to constructively blend together media and creative principles, people and processes. If you see similar interesting challenges ahead of you in the future, and would like to talk, we will definitely answer all your messages at hello@mitoperformance.hu.

The author(s)

Máté Takács

Performance Strategist

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Kosárlabda szabályok

A kosárlabda csapatok 5 fős felállásban játszanak. A nevezett csapatokat csoportokba osztjuk, a sorsolást a tornát megelőző héten minden csapat részére kiküldjük. A mérkőzéseket hivatalos játékvezető vezeti. A mérkőzések egy pályán zajlanak. A csoportok első két helyezettje az egyenes kieséses szakaszba kvalifikálja magát. Az egyenes kiesés szakaszban a csoportmérkőzések során első helyezett csapatok a másik csoport második helyezettjével játszanak, ezt követően a vesztesek a harmadik helyért mérkőznek meg egymással, majd a győztesek vívják a döntőt.

Röplabda szabályok

Csapatlétszám: 6 fő max. 2 cserejátékossal
A játék időtartama:
  • A mérkőzés egy csapat által nyert egy játszmáig tart. 
  • A játszmát az a csapat nyeri, amelyik előbb ér el 25 pontot legalább 2 pont előnnyel. 24-24-es egyenlőség esetén a játszma addig folytatódik, amíg valamelyik csapat el nem éri a két pont különbséget. 
  • Mérkőzésidő max. 20 perc, ha ezen belül a fentiek alapján nem dől el a meccs, a 20 perc mérkőzésidő leteltével előnyben levő csapat nyeri a mérkőzést.
A csapat létszáma a pályán nem csökkenhet 6 fő alá. Azt a csapatot, amelyik nem tud az összetételi előírásnak megfelelő 6 főt a pályára állítani, a játékvezető “hiányos”-nak nyilvánítja.

Labdarúgás szabályok

Csapatlétszám: 5+1 fő.

Játékidő: 2×10 perc (szünet nélkül térfélcserével)

A mérkőzéseket 3×2 méteres kapukra játsszuk.

  • A mérkőzéseket a kispályás labdarúgás szabályai szerint bonyolítjuk le.
  • A mérkőzéseken csak hernyótalpas, terem- vagy edzőcipőben lehet szerepelni, fém, vagy gumi stoplis cipő használata szigorúan tilos! 
  • Ha bármelyik csapat létszáma a kiállítások, sérülések következtében 3+1 fő alá csökken, a mérkőzést be kell szüntetni. 

Introducing Nokia to website performance measurement through page speed measurement

Business background

Page speed has become an important factor for website owners and SEOs since Google began focusing more and more on user experience factors. If companies don’t adapt to this new mindset, they will lose their organic power.

Nokia has experienced an extensive page load time on most of its pages, but lacked proper measurable information about the performance of the website. It is challenging to adapt site-wise technical modifications without understanding what is really behind the curtain.

Our solution

Mito introduced a multifactor, multi locational-targeting page speed measurement and reporting system across different devices.

Our focus was to develop a measurement system from scratch that is able to report on different page speed KPIs so we can better understand what additional analyses are needed to increase the pages’ performance. We did not only focus on a page level measurement, but also grouped pages to page types that assists us in making more educated assumptions.

We paid attention to location modularity in order to extend the number of analysed locations to additional countries by adding new Virtual Machines to our framework.

We are able to measure different KPIs on both mobile and desktop so we can see how the site performance is realized across devices.

Our measurement system and dashboard provided us insights on what type of elements of the different page types might cause low speed performance and it helped us to further analyse the loading curve, just as the opportunities in Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations for the different page types.

Results

We set up the measurement system and the dashboard that reports on website performance and opportunities.

Through properly tracking the page speed improvements, Nokia becomes a more powerful organic participant in the telco market in Google search, while they provide a better user experience for their visitors.

End to end measurement solution for Nokia

Nokia is an innovative global leader in 5G, networks and phones.

An international business of this size requires a comprehensive measurement strategy including responsible data collection, consistent management of tags and measurement codes, personalized website tracking and purposeful conversion rate optimization (CRO).

We kicked off Analytics projects from January, 2020, beginning with extensive Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics audits. Besides inspecting the different system settings, we also optimized the measurement and pixel implementation processes within Nokia in order to increase efficiency and reduce implementation periods.

After the key adjustments and process harmonization, we have moved forward and started to work on the website and landing pages’ efficiency, including several conversion rate optimization tasks such as heatmap analysis and A/B testing.

Results

Nokia is receiving continuous support from our analytics team to ensure the client’s measurement and data is reliable. Due to streamlined processes, implementation periods are shorter and we eliminated unnecessary website tracking codes which cause longer loading times.

Nokia Allwhere - Private Wireless - Global digital media campaign planning & execution

Building brand awareness and creating demand for Nokia Private Industrial Wireless in new vertical markets

Nokia launched a digital campaign to educate the market that their industrial-focused LTE solutions are the key in accelerating the ultimate benefits of digital transformation and realization of the fourth industrial revolution.

The goal: to build brand awareness and create demand for Nokia private Industrial Wireless solutions in new vertical markets, especially infrastructure or asset-heavy industries where digitization has been mostly restricted to point solutions without general network connectivity.

Our approach

We’ve developed a multi-touch global digital media campaign, which covered the entire user journey of business leaders, from education to making a business decision.

Our main goal was to make Nokia visible on a large scale through automated solutions and smart targeting to reach people when they are reading, talking, learning about or searching for private wireless networks.

To archive this, we’ve utilized the combination of digital media platforms, including industry specific content sponsorships, social media ads, paid search, programmatic hyperlocal and Digital out-of-home ads in front of target company HQs. We’ve made sure that when our key audience is browsing the web, using social media on their phones or just walking outside of their offices, they see a relevant Nokia ad.

Results

The campaign has reached over 80 000 business decision makers and influencers in 3500 target companies, across 5 industry verticals globally.

Private wireless solution specific brand search volume increased by 70% during the campaign period (YoY). In Q2 and Q3 2020, Nokia Enterprise had a double digit year-on-year growth in net sales and new customers.

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