What is the game plan?
When I meet with a marketing team the first thing that I do is ask a lot of questions. Depending on the answers to the questions I can quickly do an evaluation of what, if any, changes should be looked at. These are the starting point and the first ones to tackle but trust me, I love to ask questions. Together we will have fun finding the answers.
1. What is each piece of your creative intended to do?
Is it simply to increase viewership? Is it needed to keep key talent happy? Is it to improve image of your channel? Does it meet the aspirations of your larger company? Before you can measure results you need to have clearly defined goals for each campaign.
2. Who is the intended audience for each of your marketing messages?
The most obvious answer is the viewer. But which viewer? The one currently watching you or potential new viewers? What about advertisers, cable/streaming providers, your talent, your staff, regulators, investors? It is important to understand what your message is saying to a complicated audience.
3. Why did you do the creative that way?
There is more than one way to do creative for any campaign. And they all have the potential to work. But you need to clearly understand why you took a particular creative direction because it has to fit into a much larger, complex marketing plan.
4. Why did you place the marketing message where you did?
The biggest part of this is why are you running promos where you are running them on your own air? Who are they intended to reach in the different places you are running them? Why did you (or why didn’t you) run these promos on sister stations/networks? Why did you (or why didn’t you) place any of your messages externally?
When I first came to CNN one of the first questions I asked my new design group was “Why is the CNN logo on the promos for the new program you are launching, Erin Burnett Out Front, blue? I thought the CNN color was red?” It wasn’t a criticism, it was a question of curiosity. It turned out no one had really considered why it was blue. It matched the color of the new show, but there was no consideration as to whether it was the right thing to do for the CNN brand.
It turned out that this amazing brand of over 30 years did not have a style guide. There was nothing preventing anyone in the network from making the logo blue, pink or purple with green dots. There were no brand standards. You can’t protect your brand if you don’t even have guidelines on how to use your logo. We developed a style guide that everyone had to follow, a specific color of red (previously there were 5 different reds in use), an architecture for the CNN logo (there were 24 different shapes of the CNN letters in use) and developed a font for CNN that is now used in all applications on air and digital worldwide, CNN Sans. All this came about because I asked the question as to why the CNN logo was in blue.