By Adam Wakefield
At the latest Digital Den hosted by NATIVE VML at it's Johannesburg offices in Sandton, digital strategist Jessica Barrett began by noting how great ideas come from great strategies and great ideas should feel like stories.
“Essentially, these stories need to give you insight into [people] and these insights need to feel true and they need to invoke emotion,” she said.
When it came to NATIVE VML’s strategic framework, it came down to four letters: OCTA, standing for objective, challenge, truth, and answer.
Barrett said nine out of 10 times, what an agency received from a client was a creative brief, and having a discernible framework for a creative team to work with was advantageous.
The importance of an objective could not be overstated, as it related to what a business wanted to achieve and how its success would be measured. Barrett said often, when a client brief was received, it was never clear what the actual objective was.
An account planner should be thinking, “What does the client actually want to achieve?” and “What are we looking at communicating with our customers at this time and what will our ultimate measure of success be?” Often when it came to a digital brief, the most difficult part was arriving at a strategy that both the agency and the client could believe in.
Once objective had been settled, the rest of OCTA framework could be tackled.
When it came to challenge, the question to ask was; “What is the one thing that is currently standing in our way that will tip other barriers into that place?”
For truth, the question was; “What do we know about people that will overcome this barrier, meet the objective and create a sustainable connection with our brand long into the future?”
When arriving at answer, it was meeting the objective and going beyond it.
Barrett moved onto some of the specifics of crafting a digital strategy, noting; “A strategy is channel agnostic when we start off. Within the digital space, we never say we need to do a Facebook strategy or we need to do a digital strategy.”
Rather, the place to start off is what needs to be done then working backwards from that point. A strategy was a plan to accomplish an objective that’s implementable and measurable, and in terms of digital strategy, it's a plan to accomplish using digital tools.
Barrett stressed that digital did not just mean the screens consumers interact through, such as smart phones, tablets or PCs, with digital actually defined as anything with a chip in it.
When it came to planning a digital strategy, it sits within other types of media, being earned, owned and bought media. Owned media is property such as data bases, brand websites, social communities and blogs, while bought media was anything that had been paid for. Earned media equaled shares, re-posts, and reviews.
“The goal is to get as much earned media for as little investment as possible,” Barrett suggested. “Digital should ultimately end disruption. It should end that really annoying layer of advertising in your life that you have become immune to. It really needs to be purposeful.”
Put another way, digital advertising should earn the customer’s attention. The digital space has changed to such a degree that a person’s ecosystem could not be infiltrated without being invited in.
“You are not competing with other brands, you are competing with cat videos and Lady Gaga,” she said. “You really need to do something that stands out and makes people want to watch your advertising.”