Integration not imitation

I was recently speaking to a Salmon Crew member about the myths and misconceptions around comms strategy, and boy oh boy – there are many.

One pervasive problem I see: people confuse comms strategy with media strategy, which means most comms plans end up looking kinda the same.

Thankfully, there are ways around this that don't feel too overwhelming. I'm a simple mind, so I like simple models. And this one works for me:

  • Audience barriers

  • Roles of comms

  • Channel-first thinking

But before we get into all that, we ought to cover some of the basics of what the evidence says about how we cut through in communications.

What comms strategy is not

It's definitely not a template you rinse and repeat to the next client. Sure, some things are consistent, but when possible you want to make it bespoke for the problem at hand. Otherwise it's not integration, but imitation.

Creativity in context

I absolutely love this quote from the smart folks at Craft Media, because it positions comms strategy not as something separate from ideas, but as integral to bring out their fullest potential. Comms strategy is creative too!

Know what you can control

This bears repeating over and over again when everyone continues to get obsessed with hyper-personalisation (now with an AI flavour!): apart from brand size, creativity is the most potent way to grow advertising profits.

Brands are a business thing

The simplest answer to "what's the value of a brand" is "you get to charge more money for the same things". It's that simple. Doesn't make it easy, as we'll see in a minute, but it really is that simple. Send this to your CFO.

F*cking funnels

I am a total sucker for brutal simplification, and for every 10 over-complicated funnels out there, you have a Dr Grace Kite dropping the goods like the above. There are fundamentally two roles for comms, yeah?

Meaning = money

And on the topic of binaries, I'm also a sucker for looking at objectives in a very simple form. In some circles you could have business, marketing and communications objectives, but the above works well enough.

This feels basic, but most businesses don't know the difference between one type of objective and the other. This erodes the quality of their work, because it creates confusion, wasted time and money, and just ok results.

There's no perfect mix

I grew up in the world of social media and content strategy, where 'best practices' were everyone's favourite expression to hate. Turns out, while we've been obsessing with 60/40 as the ideal brand/performance split, the 'best practices' really depend on your business's stage of growth.

Imitation doesn't work

Charts like the below are also widely circulated in the world of social and content, where we argue that designing for the platform first works best.

And yet, so many agencies still insist on saying all you need to do is adapt your TVC for social. Well, this counter example often works well: why don't you put a screenshot of your TVC in your OOH? Yep, exactly.

Creative consistency

Ah, but there is a little rub. Just because creativity matters, it doesn't mean you can now go willy-nilly and add more layers into an idea before it even has a chance to establish itself. Evidence shows ads barely wear in, let alone wear out, and as a result there's lot of money being left on the table.

Famous... for what?

"Fame" is something we all know is needed, but we don't always know how to do it well. This isn't because of ignorance, but lack of specificity.

People assume fame is simply making some noise around a brand, but evidence increasingly shows that being famous without being linked with specific buying situations is again leaving precious money on the table.

(Jenni Romaniuk's work on Category Entry Points is outstanding here, and I'm in the process of writing a whole separate workshop on how we can use CEPs to design more effective content strategies. Coming soon.)

Liberate the logo

Whenever people say "clearly branded", we immediately assume it's about ensuring logos need to be everywhere. But actually, despite being the most used of branding devices, logos don't correlate with branded attention.

You're better off exploring a whole other palette of assets, or developing them, so you can develop more distinctive and correctly attributed comms.

(I'm also developing a workshop on how to apply brand codes on social content, because the bar is so crazy low here and we can do much better. Basically, every time I write a workshop I get ideas for 3 others. Fun.)

More isn't more

Probably every strategist's favourite point, but again bears repeating: loading an ad with tons of messages quickly becomes counter-productive.

It makes logical sense (tell people more stuff!), but only if you think the job is done once by adding all the inputs. It's quite the opposite, the job is ensuring people take out the right thing. In other words, just because we're saying tons of things, doesn't mean people recall them. More isn't more.

Click crack

Clicks, while important, are not the be all end all of communications. Sure, they make for a more controllable story, but they're also full of attribution problems that don't reflect how a comms mix works.

The best chart I've seen recently on this is from Tracksuit and TikTok, who've demonstrated that actually higher awareness delivers better conversions. Don't get so obsessed milking that funnel that you forget to keep adding to its top. Performance works harder if you're known first.

Reject reachmania (to an extent)

Another two charts that tell a similar story: reach and frequency, while important, can't also be taken as gospel because otherwise you end up buying a lot of high reach, low cost, low impact media (like banners).

What the evidence also shows is that high reach boosts salience, but doesn't boost meaning and difference alone, which is where you invest in higher quality attention media environments. It's a fun equation to solve.

Bringing it all together

We go back to the model I mentioned right at the top: audience barriers, role of comms, channel-first thinking. It's the basis of a good comms framework, but it's also linked to probably my favourite briefing format.

This model, which most people don't really know how to use well, is a fantastic tool to reverse engineer all sorts of comms ideas. So that's precisely the exercise I like to then do with people: look at this ad, let's reverse engineer the brief and see where we get to. It's hugely educational. You can do this on your commute as well, or when browsing Instagram.

And that should give you a little bit of a primer of how I think these days about communications strategy. There's far more nuance across different channels, audiences and categories, but this is precisely what makes it interesting and necessarily something you only understand in context.

Integration not imitation

In a nutshell, if you think comms strategy is the act of spitting out channels, don't worry, a machine will do that for you. The real craft is in knowing how to combine those channels for the most optimal effects.

Integration isn't simply the act of making your communications look the same everywhere. That's just imitation. Instead, the trick is knowing what is fixed in the comms idea, and what needs to be flexible in its execution.

If you'd like me to run this session for your business, as is or bespoke, I'm taking this workshop on the road. I'd love to help your team find clarity in their communications strategy. Just click below to get started.

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