The leap of faith
While we’re as keen as anyone on sound campaign planning, setting clear objectives and generally demonstrating the ROI of what we do, I get pretty frustrated by the amount of brands that seem unable or unwilling to take any risk when it comes to their marketing & PR spend.
Yes, money is still tight and no, brand owners shouldn’t carelessly throw their budget around without thinking carefully about it, but, at the end of the day marketing (in whatever form) always has and always will carry an element of uncertainty about it. It’s just not possible to guarantee that any campaign will work before you execute it – there are too many factors in play. Good planning, great creativity and hard work can minimise this risk, but you can’t eliminate it altogether. It seems that marketing people recently have become less willing to accept this. Perhaps it’s because they’ve grown up in the digital age and are used to everything being instantly measurable and trackable, or maybe it’s just a reaction to tough economic times.
Whatever the cause, the net result of this risk-avoidance approach is that these brands will end up doing nothing at all, apart from a narrow range of tactics that they feel will “definitely” work, but which won’t truly engage with consumers or make a lasting impact.
Think about the great ad campaigns over the years – Skoda, Meerkat, Cadbury Gorilla etc… – most of them could easily have fallen flat on their faces but the agency and the client were willing to step outside their comfort zone and do something different based on gut instinct. The same applies to PR campaigns, and I’m not talking just about taking creative risks. Sometimes, just deciding to work with an agency and commit to doing something is enough of a first step, but you have to take it, otherwise we just end up writing endless proposals that could have made a difference, but no-one will ever know, and the client ends up doing what they’ve always done, but not really getting to where they want to be.
Eddie M.
