3 Vital Elements of a Creative Campaign

A great creative campaign isn’t just visually appealing. It has to capture your audience’s attention and connect with them in a meaningful way. These three elements are essential contributors to the success of any truly creative advertising campaign. 

A strong concept

Concept is king. Without a strong concept behind it, your campaign is just words and pictures that might (and might not) succeed at conveying some information. The more creatively your conceptual ideas connect to your brand or to the assignment, the more impact your messaging will have.

Finding the right concept — the one that rings true both for your brand and in the minds of your audience — is no small feat. When we build campaigns, we explore as many concepts as possible before we pare down to the top 3–5 to share. The strongest concepts rise to the top not just because they’ll stand out among all the other ads competing for your audience’s attention, but because they strike a chord with your audience, they’re on strategy, and they break new ground. When the concepts we create for you make you think “Well, that’s unexpected,” you know things are on the right track. 

Memorability

What good is a campaign if people forget whose it is, or forget that they were exposed to it? The ad campaigns and messages we find memorable are the ones that connect with us on an emotional level. They might make us feel happy. Or sad. Or motivated, or empowered, or safe, angry, comfortable… you get the idea. A campaign that makes us feel something is much more powerful and effective than a campaign that simply conveys information. And yes, a campaign can do both… quite successfully.

Related to memorability are the ideas of expandability and longevity. A memorable campaign is robust enough to expand across multiple media platforms without feeling watered down, forced, or worn out. It also has the strength to last a long time, by allowing itself to be refreshed, modified, and iterated while remaining true to the original concept. A great example of this is Progressive’s use of the character Flo. As of this writing, she’s been a mainstay in their marketing campaigns for 17 years, appearing in more than 1,000 ads (per Wikipedia) for the brand. 

Qualitative metrics of success

Quantitative data is vital to help you understand the facts and figures surrounding your campaign’s reach, activities, ROI, and other hard, measurable statistics. Much of that kind of measurement is built into the services offered by our digital, media, and social teams.

But there are softer qualitative metrics that are equally valuable and measurable. Surveys, focus groups, monitoring of social media properties, and user interviews are meaningful ways to collect information about your audience’s emotional response to a campaign, its relevance to their lives, its effect on their perception of your brand, and its impact on your brand’s image. These valuable insights help you adjust your messaging and tweak campaign executions to ensure a continued connection with your target audience.

Of course, RDW can help with all of this, from developing strong creative concepts and memorable work, to collecting and measuring qualitative metrics. Contact us and discover why we just might be the perfect fit for your next campaign.