Campaign Development

Campaign development consulting is the work of turning a settled brand position into a campaign the market reacts to: the commercial behavior the campaign is paid to change, the creative idea at its center, the messaging architecture that holds across channels and formats, and the measure agreed before launch that will settle afterward whether it worked. Vivaldi has developed campaigns for brands including Allianz and Hendrick’s Gin. This is commercial brand and marketing campaign work for companies. We do not advise on nonprofit capital campaigns, fundraising feasibility or donor programs.

• Since 1999brand and campaign strategy for consumer and B2B companies
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Brand Leadershipco-authored by our founder

When companies bring us in

• The position is settled and nothing in the market has noticed yet, because the position has never been expressed as a campaign.
• The last three campaigns were creative answers to a strategy question, and each one started from a blank page.
• A launch or a category entry is coming and the sales organization has to carry it, so the campaign has to work as an argument and not only as an ad.
• The brand is large, well known and holds very little actual equity, which is a different problem from being unknown.
• Campaign reporting arrives full of reach and engagement and leadership cannot tell from it whether anything changed.

Why most campaigns start in the wrong place

The honest version of the opposing case is that attention is a real asset. A brand nobody notices cannot be chosen, and work that gets watched has done something that work which gets skipped has not. That is true, and both of the campaigns described further down this page were built to be watched.

The problem is the order of the questions. Most campaign processes begin with a channel plan and a budget split, then brief a creative idea to fit the slots already bought. The idea arrives last, so it has to be general enough to survive every format, which is another way of saying it cannot be specific about anything. A campaign that is not specific about anything cannot be wrong, and an idea that cannot be wrong cannot be right either.

Three failures follow from that order. The campaign is asked to carry a proposition the business never settled, and creative cannot resolve a positioning argument, though it can hide one for a quarter. The campaign targets a demographic rather than a demand space, so it speaks to people who look alike instead of people trying to get the same thing done. And the campaign is measured on delivery: assets shipped, channels live, on time and on budget. That is a production report, not a result.

Our order is the reverse. Name the behavior, find the moment where that behavior is decided, build one idea that belongs to that moment, and only then decide what each channel is for.

What our campaign development services include

Six bodies of work. Most engagements use three or four of them.

1. The campaign objective and the demand it speaks to

Before any idea is written, the commercial job is made explicit: the specific behavior to change, whether that is trial in a new segment, switching from a named competitor, frequency among people who already buy, or entry into a new occasion. The target is defined as a demand space, by what customers are trying to get done, rather than as a demographic. Categories describe what companies sell. Demand spaces describe what customers are trying to get done, and the valuable ones cut across the categories incumbents organize around. Writing down what the campaign is not for is usually the harder and more useful half of the conversation.

2. The creative platform

A central idea that is true to the brand position and specific enough to be wrong. In practice this means finding the moment in the customer’s life where the behavior is actually decided, and building the campaign inside it rather than around the product. It is the difference between a campaign about car insurance and a campaign about the school run.

3. Messaging architecture across channels and formats

An architecture that survives being cut down, so the fifteen second edit, the social series and the sales deck are making the same argument rather than three related ones. This includes distinctive assets that accumulate, so the next campaign inherits recognition instead of rebuilding it.

4. Channel roles and the run plan

Channel roles rather than a channel list: what each one is there to do, which ones create demand and which ones convert demand the campaign has already created. Sequencing covers the whole campaign period, including what happens after launch week, which is where most plans go quiet.

5. Enablement for the people who meet the customer

In B2B a campaign is the opening line of a sales conversation rather than the whole of it. Sales teams, partners and frontline staff get the argument in a form they can use, so the campaign does not stop at the point where a human takes over.

6. Measurement agreed before launch

A preference or behavior measure written down before anything runs, alongside the delivery metrics. We also read cost per acquired customer during and after the campaign, because a campaign that builds preference should make acquisition cheaper rather than only busier.

How a campaign development engagement works

1. Frame. Leadership interviews, a read of the current position and the category conversation, and customer research into where the target behavior is decided. The output is a written commercial objective and a demand space, not a brief full of adjectives.
2. Find. Territories and candidate ideas, built against that objective and tested with the people the campaign has to move. The output is one platform with the reasons the others were rejected.
3. Build. The messaging architecture by audience and format, the distinctive assets, the channel roles and the sequencing, plus enablement for sales or frontline teams where the campaign has to be carried in person.
4. Read. The measurement model agreed before launch, and a review against it over a full purchase cycle rather than over launch week.

Campaign development results

Two published campaigns are tagged to this service. Both are consumer brand campaigns, and both are reported on attention and engagement rather than on revenue, so we present them that way.

For Allianz, a leading insurer with very little brand equity, the brief was to connect with an audience in social and establish the company as a car insurance leader. The campaign narrowed to one moment: the school run, when traffic is slow and tensions are high. School Run Stories dramatized that moment as sitcom style content following ordinary families around the UK. 75% of people watched the films all the way through, which the case records as some of the best results the client had seen.

For Hendrick’s Gin, the annual World Cucumber Day celebration of the brand’s signature garnish was the occasion. Rather than conventional advertising, the campaign ran a series of experiments at a fictional laboratory revealing the cucumber’s ability to express emotion, then carried the idea into real world events at bars and festivals where participants collaborated on a musical track with the cucumbers. The content recorded view through rates over 80% in digital and over 30% on social, more than 6m views, and 32k clicks to the Hendrick’s website, in a craft gin market the case describes as now flooded.

Both results are attention measures. Neither case reports a sales figure, and we would rather say so than imply one.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for campaign development

We are a strategy firm, and the campaign is where strategy either reaches a market or does not. That gives us a particular position in a campaign process. We settle what the campaign is for and what it says, and we are willing to tell a client that the proposition rather than the creative is the problem, which is an unprofitable thing for a production business to say.

The demand space view is ours rather than borrowed. It is the same lens we apply in segmentation and in go-to-market work, and it is why our campaign targets tend to be defined by what customers are trying to get done rather than by who they are.

We are also clear about the edges. We develop the campaign idea, the architecture and the plan, and we have worked with clients on producing the content itself. We do not plan or buy media, and we do not run always-on channels for clients. Where that work is needed, it sits with a media or social partner working from our brief.

How to evaluate a campaign development consultant

Worth asking of any firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask what they will measure, before you ask what they will make. If the answer is reach, engagement and recall alone, the campaign will be defended on those terms whatever happens to sales.
• Ask how they define the target. A demographic and a psychographic profile are descriptions. A demand space is a decision about where you compete.
• Ask what happens if the proposition is the problem. A firm that will take the brief regardless is selling production. The useful answer is that they will say so and stop.
• Ask where the idea comes from in their process. If it arrives after the channel plan, it was built to fit slots rather than to change a behavior.
• Ask what they will not do. A firm that claims strategy, creative, production, media buying and always-on channels under one roof is describing a billing model, not a capability.

Campaign development consultancy vs creative agency vs media agency?

Related work

Campaign development is one of seven services inside our Brand Acceleration practice, which is concerned with converting brand meaning into demand. The closest neighbors:

• Brand activation is the nearest service to this one and the distinction is worth stating plainly: an activation brings a brand into a specific moment or place, usually live and bounded in time, while a campaign is a sustained, planned communication with a creative idea at its center. The Hendrick’s work above crossed that line deliberately, which is why both services claim it.
• Marketing strategy if the question above the campaign is still open: which markets, which priorities and how the budget is split across them.
• Segmentation and targeting if the campaign target is still a demographic and needs to become a demand space.
• Go-to-market strategy if the campaign carries a launch rather than an established business.
• Social and digital marketing for the channels the campaign runs through, and how the always-on work continues after the campaign period.
• Performance marketing for the paid media that converts demand the campaign creates.
• Customer acquisition if the question is what a new customer costs and why, since a campaign that builds preference should lower that number.

Background reading on why we define campaign targets by demand rather than by category: most marketing is about market taking, growth comes from market making.

Campaign development consulting in the US and worldwide

We work from 10 offices on four continents, and campaigns are where that matters most, because an idea that travels and an idea that translates are not the same thing. US engagements usually run from New York. European and UK work runs from our offices there, which is where the Allianz and Hendrick’s campaigns were built. Asian markets are served from our offices in the region.

In practice this means a campaign platform is pressure tested against the markets it has to run in before it is signed off, rather than being adapted market by market afterward once the asset library already exists. Teams are assembled around the markets in scope and work in one engagement, not as a central brief with local interpretations.