Here's one of the ways brand teams fail. It happens more often than not. Invest too much budget in one idea. Believe it's sure to succeed from surrounding yourself with like-minded people or a culture that punishes diversity. Run the single big production cost creative that has about the same chances of success as each of several smaller production creatives. Why? Because it's less work. Because leadership doesn't understand statistics. Because it's more likely to win some award on production quality. Because brand isn't measured by results. None of these are good reasons to blow the budget on one creative. Next time you see the brand team do this, gold spray paint a bunch of eggs and leave a basket on their desk on Bring Your Kids to Work Day. #brandmarketing #tv #marketing #performancemarketing
Fractional CMO/CGO, Ex -Fabletics, Good American, Savage X Fenty | Published Author | Connector
If you're a DTC company please don't make this mistake. ❌ ☠ Company 1 & 2 spent $200k+ on a TV commercial shoot, Company 3 spent a whopping $750k. This was all three's first time running on TV/CTV. I had a chance to speak to one of the companies who was about to spend $250k. I told them I would work with a vetted production partner in the DTC space and get them 3 commercials for <$50k. Their response? "Wait really? Tell us more" Then they proceeded to make the expensive commercial anyway. Company 4 was more scrappy in their approach and open to new ideas. I explained to them how TV can and should be treated as a performance marketing channel and can be optimized to a CAC goal similar to meta and google. I told them to de-risk their investment in creative by producing multiple concepts so their campaign had a better chance of winning. As promised I got them a deal for 3 commercials :15 & :30 (which came out pretty good, educational, well produced and brand friendly) for <$40k. If you didn't guess already out of all 4, company 4 ended up crushing results and have already dropped CAC by 40% post pilot. Their willingness to try various creative and be open with network testing and new ideas have now unlocked a new performance media channel for them (almost inline with meta and google). One that is also giving them solid lifts on Amazon sales. As for companies 1,2,3 - The results weren't so good and they ended up pausing the channel completely. I was introduced to most of them post pilot and shared best practices should they want to revisit in the future. When I asked them why they went ahead with one, really expensive commercial? They said "We wanted to make a splash with the brand" My advice - Only make something super expensive if you're going to run on the superbowl or the concept is SO strong that it may achieve virality. Although I would argue this is also achievable without breaking the bank (anyone remember Coinbase's QR code?) If not let's treat this like another performance marketing channel like the scrappy Growth marketers we are! If you want to chat more about best practices and TV creative please do get in touch. It's my favorite topic these days #tv #advertising #ctv #commercial #dtc #marketing
