Photo credit: Guilford Meetup
An analysis of the best marketing campaigns reveals several key takeaways for marketers. Warc, an advertising and marketing consultant, just released this year’s “Warc 100,” its selection of the top marketing campaigns around the world.
Although successful marketing campaigns can take different routes, a comparison of the top 100 shows common themes of winning campaigns.
Size and budget count. The best campaigns were typically larger. More often than not, they lasted longer, used more channels and had larger budgets. It’s difficult for short-term, low-budget campaigns to deliver breakthrough results. Yet top campaigns relying on earned media were common. Campaigns lasting three to 12 months were more successful than shorter ones.
More channels. The top 100 used more channels, an average of 7.4 compared to 6.5 for other campaigns Warc analyzed. Many top campaigns combined social media, earned media and online video. While social media was popular for both groups, the top 100 tended to favor online video and earned media through public relations.
Traditional creativity still works. Emotion and storytelling remain powerful marketing tools, regardless of channel. The top 100 campaigns were more likely to use emotion, storytelling and humor as creative techniques. Personalization appears over-rated as a creative approach, as it was employed less frequently.
More measurement. Top campaigns succeed on a range of metrics. The best campaigns tended to track more metrics. They are also far more likely to track hard metrics like sales and revenue. That was not surprising, according to Warc. Sales was the most widely reported hard metric in the best 100 campaigns, at 48 percent of the total. In the other campaigns, sales was reported 40 percent of the time.
The most successful campaigns also tracked more soft metrics on average — 2.4 versus 2.2 for the rest. However, the degree of difference was less, suggesting that hard metrics are the better measure of success. Social buzz was the most-cited soft metric, at 63 percent of Warc 100 cases and 55 percent of the rest.
“The divergence between the Warc 100 and the rest is particularly wide for hard metrics, suggesting that the best campaigns set a range of commercial KPIs to make sure they are succeeding,” the study concluded.
And the Winner Was …
The winning campaign was Kan Khajura Tesan from Hindustan Unilever in India. It created Kan Khajura a free on-demand entertainment channel that’s available on mobile phones. Interspersed within the 15-minute entertainment sessions were three or four 15-second ad “capsules” promoting Unilever.
The service reached 25.5 percent of the India’s impoverished Bihar and Jharkhand regions. At its peak, the campaign’s subscription base was expanding at a rate of 45,000 daily.
Bottom Line: Analyzing the best marketing campaigns can help marketers improve their own campaigns. The best marketing campaigns were larger and tracked more metrics, especially hard metrics, than other campaigns. Although most businesses lack the budgets of large global brands, they do have the ability to increase their measurement capabilities by tracking both hard metrics like sales and revenues and soft metrics like social media buzz.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
