CAMPAIGN
Nine questions to answer before any budget moves
Most campaigns do not fail on execution. They fail because a stage was never answered, and nobody noticed until the money was spent.
There is a pattern to campaigns that disappoint. The post-mortem blames the creative. It is almost never the creative.
What actually happened is that one stage was skipped early, and every stage after it inherited the gap. A vague offer produces a vague landing page, which produces a vague ad. The ad is what you see at the end, so the ad gets blamed.
The blank page is information. A stage you cannot fill in is not a formatting problem, it is the part of the campaign that does not exist yet.
The nine stages
Every campaign, however small, answers nine questions. You can answer them deliberately or let them get answered by default, but all nine get answered.
- Research. What do you know that your competitor does not?
- Spine. What is the one sentence this whole campaign argues?
- Offer. What exactly do they get, and what does it cost?
- Big idea. Why would anyone repeat this to someone else?
- Landing page. What is the single next action?
- Creative. Where does the camera point?
- Distribution. Where are these people already looking?
- Email. What happens on day two?
- Performance. What number would make you stop?
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The two that are usually blank
Research is usually blank because the honest answer is uncomfortable. If the only thing you can cite is your own opinion, you have a hypothesis rather than a finding. That is not a reason to stop. Write it down as a hypothesis, one line, and carry on. A hypothesis marked as one is far more useful than a confident blank.
Performance is blank because naming the number that would end a campaign is uncomfortable while you still believe in it. That is also the only time you will name it honestly. After the money is spent, the number becomes a negotiation.
The order matters
The stages are ordered because the information is ordered. You cannot choose a channel before you know who the audience is, and you cannot write a landing page before the offer is settled. Every time a team jumps straight to creative, what has actually happened is that they guessed every earlier stage silently.
Those silent guesses are what reappear later as an ad that does not work.
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