When Sexy is Just Not Enough: Lessons for Marketers

There is a saying in digital marketing circles that it is tough to get executives to buy into big shifts of funds into digital because there are no big sexy ad campaigns they can show off. Well, I think we have gotten past that in the digital world because the creative ideas have gotten very sexy.
I recently watched the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA's) Digital and Social Conference, and I saw a ton of brilliant creative, ranging from the "Rose" basketball shoe launch video series by Adidas to the way Taco Bell mobilizes its 7 million faithful fans through social media posts. These creative concepts may not be broadcast to millions in one wave of TV ads, but any executive would be proud to share them on stage and tout the impact they were measured to have.

Though, is how much of the presentations showed off the sexy ideas and made claims about their amazing ROI, but did not talk as much about HOW they made it happen. Yet, there is a massive hunger among marketers, including those in the audience, for not just cool ideas they can learn from, but also for finding out the mechanics that make sexy happen.
Most of the questions to the speakers after their presentations were about HOW, such as:

• How did you do the research that led to those insights?
• How engaged were your executives in such a change in directions?
• How big a team do you have to manage all of this?
• What were the roles of your agencies and how did you get them to work together?
• What tools did you use to optimize the media in flight?
• How did you prewire the execution so it could be measurable?
• What costs do you include in your ROI figures?

What is clear is that the complexity of executing these cross-channel, high impact campaigns is so much higher than what marketers dealt with in traditional media. The operations side matters, and even though it is so much more mundane than showing the sexy stuff, it is as important to learn from as the creative concepts are.

Marketing leaders spend much more time sharing the sexy creative stuff, and less time challenging their organizations on how they need to operate differently. How to take a new approach to the next product launch. How to pull all of the agencies together upfront with a robust brief at the start of a campaign. How to track and act on the results of campaigns in flight. How to create a pool of investment purely for innovative testing. How to rethink the way to measure ROI to include brand investment, social amplification, and owned media.
It may not make sexy fodder for stage presentations, but we can certainly bring it into online discussions. What major moves have you made to change your marketing operations?