If the campaign is a sword, a brand's story is the hilt.
Forging Campaign Narrative
A product campaign's story is forged from a brand's unique ID and the target marketplace. First symbolized in the trademark and logo, a product's branding grows from the brand's origin story, followed by the formation of a personality with characteristics and traits, elements that express the values through which the brand operates. The first step when developing a campaign strategy is clarity regarding the truth of what the brand stands for presently and at what stage the brand is in the arc.
Communication Arc
Like all yarning, there is a beginning, middle, and end. Branded products have a story, some more complex and less complete than others. The maturity and clarity of that story are important to understand when creating a campaign's thematics. This discovery process begins with understanding the product's positioning inside and out, and the unique problems and solutions which motivate its creation. This process requires a critical definition of the personas, from which the campaign's plot (funnel) can be derived. The plot is scheduled in thematic funnels, acts, and beats.
Campaign Grooving
The rhythm of a campaign is composed around the tonality of the thematic narrative and communication arc. The program layers of media are structured to funnel the audiences we message. These tactical choices are intended to trigger actions that qualify a broader audience into a more valuable audience for retargeting. We scale according to the objectives and measures we set at each Act and Beat of the program. The campaign rhythm is more like a road rally than a song with overlapping starts and stops depending on tactical layers in each Act and Beat and the performance of element, even down to the ad level.
Never Stop Learning
Aristotle would have been a phenomenal performance marketer. The rhythmic road rally of a campaign requires constant tracking, analysis, and a continuous thread of testing. The overlapping starts and stops of the flight lanes with their unique elements make a campaign a controlled chaos of impermanence. We hypothesize and theorize what will work, knowing we cannot predict the outcomes. We follow the data fed back through the measurement infrastructure. The framework of the campaign remains, but the layers and elements will be culled and scaled as we learn, rinse, repeat, make better.