The next time your company’s leadership sets lofty sales goals for your marketing team, remember one thing. There was a time when NASA scientists and engineers were faced with an enormous ask. Putting man on the moon – a body 384,400 km from Earth – with a spacecraft guidance system that had 64 KB of memory and less processing power than a kid’s calculator. I mention this for two reasons: we just marked the 55^th anniversary in July of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and second, we’re about to enter a time of year when many brands and their agency partners begin planning just what can and must be achieved in the coming fiscal year. As we do this, let’s keep this analogy in mind and bring what NASA had: bold belief, long-range vision and the meticulous planning needed to set achievable goals while still shooting for the stars. But let’s also make sure we also have a lot of fun doing it. In developing campaigns, roll outs and brand experiences for consumers in 2025 and beyond let’s think about achieving success in three ways.

Launch a strategy that’s grounded in data

NASA’s success is forever codified in the iconic words of Neil Armstrong, but it came down to meticulous planning, data analysis, and, crucially, scenario modeling and risk management. What would happen when variables were changed, when the unexpected occurred, and what tactics could be changed on the fly? As marketers, we’re well versed in conducting upfront market research into target audience and appropriate messaging, or jumping into the intensity and fun of creative campaign ideation, but often fall down on continuing to use data analytics, and now AI, to plan for other eventualities and monitor progress. Go beyond initial consumer intelligence and market analysis to create a plan B and even C – in other words, test and learn and be nimble enough to pivot quickly. Test which campaign components, creative executions, or brand initiatives that meet strategic objectives but can be added to the mix if early engagement numbers with audiences don’t happen as planned.

It’s crucial to do your homework and deeply understand your consumers so that you can connect through culture and technology. Shoot for the stars, by all means, but ground your strategies in data. Create unexpected partnerships that give your campaign relevance and reach, and make your dollars travel further. Keep learning about your audience and their behaviors. Dive into technology that best connects with them and helps you understand what really drives consumer culture and behavior, and how your brand can expand to join the fun. 

Find ways to ignite campaign creativity

The ingenuity and creativity behind the Apollo 11 mission was, and still is, a testament to the power of bold, innovative and creative thinking. For marketers and their agencies, finding ways to ignite creativity in campaigns is essential to success. In marketing, this starts by fostering a collaborative environment which can lead to more innovative and unexpected ideas. Encourage teamwork across departments—creative, analytics, and product development—to brainstorm and refine tactical ideas. Next, review use of emerging technologies in campaign ideation. Generative AI isn’t a replacement for the nuance and contextual ideation of the human brain, but as a brainstorming tool to collate information, quotes, statistics and other intelligence, it can rapidly advance creative team efforts toward the stages of ideation that matter. Automated tools and apps for everything from audience segmentation to message deployment can also generate insights and intelligence that help to personalize audience messaging more effectively early in the campaign ideation. Lastly, storytelling should be a multi-media effort using video, infographics, animations, audio and podcasts to reach and engage consumers.

Instead of focusing just on product lines or SKUs, find ways to give your overall brand some creative love. What about your brand is the true heartbeat, the soul, the thing that we can be curious about, attach to, and build loyalty around? Think big, or you'll get lapped by all the others selling the same story. Long-range vision is important, but so is stoking the creative engines to drive towards your end goal. That can take many shapes. Take our work this summer for Caribou’s new iced drinks line-up of fruit shakers and energy drinks, for example. That could have been a simple ad campaign, but our team developed an entire TikTok dating show “Dream Date: a Sip at Love” hosted by comedian Hannah Berner to connect with consumers in a fun and unexpected way. 

‍Create built-in adaptability for course correction

Any long-range goal whether it’s getting to the moon or gaining market share with a brand has to be a careful balance of strategy to achieve the end, but a wide variety of flexible and adaptable tactics that react to events and market conditions. You can bake-in more flexibility in four key ways:

1.     Agile marketing – break full campaigns into shorter sprints to test performance of promotions, incentives and A-B ads and adjust accordingly. Test all variables like headlines, images and CTAs and deploy multivariate testing to determine which combinations of ad elements deliver best.

2.     Employ data analytics dashboards – create customizable dashboards for campaigns, set to monitor against KPIs like reach, engagement and click throughs, and implement alert systems that can notify you when ads, promotions or other initiatives fall below performance benchmarks you set.

3.     Develop flexible content strategies – develop robust, cross-channel content calendars by digital venue, social channel, mobile and online, and ensure content can be modular, swapped out and easily repurposed for maximum value.

4.     Continuous feedback – you can’t succeed without information on what does and doesn’t work so empower customers, consumers and all stakeholders to share feedback and ideas to gather insights for improvement.

 Whether you’re a brand marketer or agency creative, in the rush to get to market or engage consumers, it’s all too easy to look for short term tactics and quick wins in a campaign. But by combining a long range vision with careful planning, performance analysis and staying creatively and executionally flexible, it’s possible to not only launch a campaign successfully but see it take off fast.

Lisa Dammann - VP Marketing