Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Dear Elizabeth,

There’s the risk here of you putting the cart before the horse.

This is a mistake.

BEFORE you begin fretting about the ins and outs of running a global campaign, and BEFORE you spend a great deal of money, you MUST sit down with all the relevant people in-house, and with your primary customers and stakeholders and answer the following questions.

It’s tempting to skip this step and dive straight into the glamorous stuff of jet setting with international ad agencies.

But don’t.

Paying attention to these issues FIRST will save you time, money, and headaches later, and potentially save you a great deal of corporate embarrassment and back peddling if things don’t go according to plan.

The biggest questions you have to answer are as follows:

Why do we need to advertise this thing or promote this message and why do we need to do this now?

What do we want this global campaign to achieve: name recognition? Increase sales? Promote a new product or category launch?

Why are we spending all this money if we are not sure of our planned outcome?

What return on our investment do we want to see and in what timeframe?

What initial first impression do we want this campaign to make in the market and to our custoemrs?

What lasting impression do we want to give people about our company, product, service, goods, or brand?

Are we trumpeting our message just for the sake of trumpeting our message? Or is what we intend to say going to benefit our customers and potential customers in significant, meaningful ways?

Are we advertising just to keep up with our category competitors? Are we going to be saying anything fresh, new, and world changing?

If the answer to the last question is “No!” why are we thinking about running this message?

A global campaign can be handled in several ways, but the most common way is for the creative work to handled by a single ad agency with worldwide reach. This most often means that the agency is part of one of the Big 4: Omnicron, Publicis, IPG, or WPP.

These are holding companies, all of which have HUGE reach both in ad agencies and media.

I have no experience in budget allocation so I suggest you seek advice from the agency you wind up working with. However, I’d imagine that portions of the overall spend are allocated to press, online, branding, and media buying.

Decisions on look and feel of the creative work are made through the internal marketing department. But this will depend on how well the creative team has been briefed. It’s normally the internal marketing people who have to defend the creative work to their corporate masters and mistresses.

There must also be input from your global brand directors. Who has the final say? That depends on your corporate structure.

It could be the CEO, it could be the CFO, it could be the CEO’s wife/husband/kid who’s good at art. This sounds jaded but I’m never surprised by the way people with no creative background judge or assess creative work.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA