How to write one ad (part 2)

Last post I shared a template for the creative brief I like to use and wanted to share my comms plan framework this time. My experience with comms planning is a little different from mine doing creative briefs. I’ve probably written a few hundred creative briefs in my career thus far, from brand launches to retail OOH briefs for car brands.

Comms planning has always been a side quest. I’ve never been 100% assigned to comms planning and I’ve never worked for a media agency, so take this with that giant salt lick. But I fell in love with the idea of a comms plan as I began to embrace the wildness with which campaigns come together. I see them as the best way to look at all of the important media and creative ingredients of a campaign on one page.

In Adam Gopnik’s book The Real Work, a dive into what makes up mastery, he writes,

“What makes something interesting to read about is its narrative grip, and stories are, of necessity, exercises in compressing time. What makes something interesting to do is that — through repetition, coordination, perseverance it stretches time. Stories shorten time, abbreviate the pauses, offer the telling highlights.”

Comms plans may not always be interesting to read, but good ones definitely compress time. That works on a couple axes. One is where they sit in the creative and media plan development process. Before creative platforms exist, I find comms plans to be overkill; a rough list of deliverables will usually do. But after we see work, strategists get to shift into a new gear to find places for ideas to live. A comms plan is a useful way to take platforms and turn them into specific, strategically-led asks. They’re full of the baby briefs that follow the creative brief.

I’ll give an example. I worked on a World Cup campaign for Volkswagen in 2018. During planning, we knew the American team was unlikely to make the tournament so we made the campaign about getting Americans to be fans of other countries’ teams. Beyond the video ads, the creative team had an idea to make a website and ads with filters, cheers, and facts that would make American viewers feel like they were fans of other teams. We also knew that, in addition to TV, there was a big buy with Facebook. A simple comms expression of this was to serve up these Facebook ads in carousels, with head-to-head teams “competing” on the morning of each game for American fans to root for them. It was a platform, meeting a media buy, meeting an audience connection point.

Another compression of time is how quickly it helps stakeholders get up to speed on a campaign, even if it’s an unfamiliar format. The reaction is usually: “Huh?” Then “Ohhhh!” A great comms plan is better than any executive summary slide in understanding where money is going and what we expect it to do for us.

It also helps us quickly get to our real problems. Marcus Aurelius is believed to have said, “The impediment to action advances action.” Knowing what to solve gets you moving. Comms barriers play a key role in making sure we’re saying and doing things in service of our audience. (Our barrier for the Volkswagen project could have been, “American fans are promiscuous and are trying to find a new team to root for each match.”)

So this is the baseline framework I use (in Google Docs form, too):

How to use it:

• Ideally your comms strategy is the same as your strategy from your creative brief, but that’s not always the case nor necessary. Tune it up after you see the platforms, and as media realities shift, to make sure it fits your original campaign objective while also serving the creative idea.
• Don’t feel like you have to write top to bottom, left to right. Start wherever you like, with a goal in mind of getting to a rich, clear picture of how you’re going to win at a campaign level.
• Add columns for each marketing objective (but keep the comms strategy sitting across all columns). In my experience, two works fine for smaller programs or brands, and more than five is probably unfocused.
• Add rows that help you tell your story better (aka compress time): channels, media mix %, planned assets, creative activation ideas.

Have some fun with it. I’d love to see examples of ones you like.

—

I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben