The Creative Briefing Is Now a Media Decision

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Lauren Leone: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Today, I have our group media director, Brandon Wilhelm, joining us. Brandon is managing our team specializing in social and programmatic. Brandon, today we want to talk about the importance of creative, its role in media strategy, and I think your thesis, which is definitely accurate, that creative is now part of the media function and no longer these two separate things. Thanks for joining.

Brandon Wilhelm: Yes, happy to join and talk about it. Creative is a big part of what we do.

Lauren: Absolutely. I know working hand-in-hand with folks like Jean, our creative director, almost as one unified team, has become so important going into this year. It was a major theme of our Scaling Up conference last year. I’d love to hear your overall thesis, what you’re seeing, what trends are, and then we can get into some specific channels and creative’s role in those channels.

Brandon: Overall, what’s really becoming clear is that creative is a key driver of performance. Sure, it’s always been a part, but now it’s actually one of the leading ways that we’re getting the results, we’re getting to the right people, we’re driving the things that we want out of campaigns, and it’s not even exclusive to just one channel. A lot of the industry is moving that way, and we see maybe one or two start to go in a direction that makes these the kinds of things that we start to employ from a creative perspective.

I think very much we’re seeing creative be a significant driver that can’t be ignored, and I think that’s exactly why we need to be talking about what that means for the ways that we develop and the ways that we run our campaigns.

Lauren: People think media strategy, media buying is the targeting settings that you’re using and how you structure the campaigns and the ad groups and the themes and geo-targeting and audience, but it’s so much more than that. You can do all those things really well, and if you don’t have the right creative strategy, you could totally take the performance.

Brandon: Yes. Ultimately, targeting used to be the thing that we focused on. We had narrow targeting with a lot of control many years ago in the past, and that’s certainly not the case anymore. It’s far too broad for that, and really targeting in platforms like Meta, for example, have been so reduced to lean on either optimization signals and/or creative.

The creative that we have there really ultimately helps to drive that targeting in ways that I think a lot of people don’t actually understand, and that means that we’re pulling the wrong levers to try to drive that performance. That part has certainly shifted, and particularly since there’ve been a lot of updates in the past year.

Lauren: I know some of the platform updates, like what’s going on with Meta. Fill us in. What are the major changes that are driving this?

Brandon: The big one that people will talk about, of course, in the last year is Andromeda within Meta and the mechanism for ad retrieval within the Meta ad platform. It’s one of many steps, but it’s the first step to determine who actually sees your ads. When you pair that with the fact that there’s broad targeting, many have heard of Advantage+, of course, which has been around for quite some time, but when those are paired together, what actually happens is the targeting itself is not what you think it is.

It’s very broad. It’s very much opening up the potential pool of who’s being targeted, reducing some of the control pretty significantly that advertisers have. Then what that’s doing is forcing to lean on the creative itself, concepts, the messaging, all of that to determine what’s relevant and who it’s relevant for. Really, what we’re seeing is those things come together. That means we have to approach campaigns differently. Because of those changes that we’ve seen, really, I think, take place in a way, in the past year, I would say, that is changing how everyone should be approaching their ads.

Lauren: I don’t think people quite realize the assets that you load into a campaign in conjunction with something like an Advantage+ is one of the signals now that the platform will use to determine who they think they should be targeting. What you’re saying, who’s visually represented in the video, in the asset, they will look for people that will resonate with that message. It used to be, we controlled that, and then we just decided which messages went with which audiences. That is not the case anymore.

Brandon: Yes, and that’s a key point because that even affects how you change and create variety within your ads. We can’t just have minor tweaks to things. We actually have to have clear messaging concepts because then the platform is so reliant on it that it actually has to use those kinds of variations and variety in the ads to be able to get to the right people, the individuals who are going to actually interact with the message that you’re putting out there.

Lauren: You yourself are not a creative director, but you’ve almost had to become one by nature of being a media strategist, media planner, or media buyer on some of these visual mediums. You talk a lot about the old way of creative briefing, always anchoring on a brand guideline. You would just start with, what does the brand itself represent? Now that’s changed as well. How do you think about it? If you’re standing up a new campaign, you’re working with a creative strategist. What direction are you giving them, media-led direction versus creative?

Brandon: First of all, I’ll just say that creative and media collaboration is incredibly important in this. That partnership is really going to form the basis of whether these approaches are successful ultimately. In this type of environment, we’re actually really starting with an iteration process where we actually have to develop clear concepts or pillars for the creative development. That might mean actually starting with the motivators or unmet needs at the top with these approaches that we’re taking, and then moving to developing a unique concept tied to each motivator.

Even from that, then we’re actually building the first versions of ads around those concepts with diverse assets and asset types, and then testing them alongside one another, and then iterating on that and building more of what’s working. That kind of layered process that’s really coming out of those motivators or unmet needs is, I think, pretty critical to driving that good performance. Honestly, even as we’re talking about this, in the last couple of weeks here, there’s a lot of updates in how campaigns are built. It’s actually creating more opportunity to do that all in one place, which is, I think, a pretty important factor.

Lauren: It used to be, “Hey, get your campaign shells built, and we’ll just drop those creatives in at the 11th hour.” Now it is one of the focal points of the build, and everything centers around it. It’s also changed the workflows, the way we stand up campaigns, the importance of the creative being produced and ready to go much earlier in the process of standing something up.

Brandon: Yes, and I think all of that is going to play into the adjusted process that we try to follow to get where we want to go with these campaigns.

Lauren: When we talk about creative, I think the tendency we talk about Andromeda, we end up focusing on Meta, and there we know it’s video and statics. In search, in Performance Max in Google, and other programs, you’ve got plain text copy. How are you thinking about that? Has that changed, too?

Brandon: I think it has. There is a lot that changes that’s different, I think, in that area, but we see a lot of the same kinds of things playing a role here. When you talk about, even in that Google landscape, with something like PMax you mentioned, it’s all, again, about signals because you have to have a great signal fed in, and creative. It’s that combination rather than targeting that really changes things here. Just like Meta, the targeting that we put in, we might feel like we’re driving directly to something that we’ve identified and care about, but they’re suggestions ultimately.

That signal, that message, is what’s going to drive the real outcome of who’s being reached in these. We’ve certainly seen that be true on that side as well. Even despite it being a little bit of a different approach, the general movement there is the same. That’s why I mentioned that this is something that we see more and more all across the industry.

Lauren: There’s a fear always amongst marketers of “Let the machine do it,” and losing control. How are you thinking about that? Still controlling the brand messaging, making sure we get the right messages to the right people, and ultimately, what are your mechanisms for measurement?

Brandon: That’s always a fair worry, but control hasn’t gone away. It’s that where the control is has changed, and it’s going to continue to change. We might not have control over some of the things that we’ve traditionally been used to, which again, that targeting lever. Some of the insight, for sure, if you’re looking at certain platforms where you may not see some of the breakdowns and details, but we’re focusing on the things that are actually going to have more control now, which is, like I mentioned, the optimization, the signals that we’re feeding in.

It’s really around this creative, and that’s why we want to focus so much on developing those right concepts. Those levers that we can pull, I already mentioned, having distinct messaging concepts is what’s incredibly important. We might look at an opportunity to do a side-by-side test. What I don’t mean by testing is doing something that says, “Book an appointment today,” versus “Schedule your visit today.” That’s not a distinct messaging concept.

Those are just minor variations. If we’re actually developing these things in a way that speaks to the pain point or a particular persona, we might actually be able to identify three distinct concepts, have something that is focused on getting help without a long wait on one side, or specific care options beyond your weekly therapy.

Or we can develop all of these concepts that are related to the type of approach where we can be testing these things side-by-side. We might do it at a broader level than you’re used to, but that’s why we need that distinction in that. I think it’s true for any of these channels that we’re talking about. I think we’ve done quite a bit of that for a lot of our campaigns, and it’s helped to really drive better and better results as we’ve leaned into it more aggressively.

Lauren: Speaking of better results and just taking some of the principles you’re talking about and giving a real practical example to people listening, I know we have a recent test we ran with one of our eye care clients. Can you just talk us through– what was the approach? You mentioned distinct messaging pillars. Give some examples because I think for people, they’re like, “What exactly does that mean?” I know you’ve got some outcomes that are worth sharing.

Brandon: Yes. We do have an example of one that we ran for a client that was actually in that Google PMax landscape. We really had general approach from the beginning that we wanted to be able to test out more of an evergreen messaging-type theme versus their promotional type of messaging. Obviously, that has strong value-driven CTAs that ultimately are likely to be able to drive more action. Knowing this landscape and everything that we’ve just talked about that matters, we really felt that it was important to have distinct separation between those and really develop concepts.

In this case, it’s actually an eye care focus. It was really built around the gradual development of struggling, like blurry vision, types of things. That concept was really developed more clearly to separate from those that would be more value-driven type of messaging, seeking an appointment now type of thing. Not only that, but it was really focused on quality, variety within those concepts as well.

We did side-by-side testing, and it wasn’t close. It was actually two to half, almost three times better performance. What I mean by that is the click-through rate, the actual cost per click being lower, and then of course, the ultimate results where we’re seeing it actually lead to booking outcomes.

Lauren: Brandon, just to be clear, the two to half to three times improvement was in the campaign where you built out more of a layered approach with both brand-level client frustration problem statement, evergreen, and the promotional versus previously just running promotional?

Brandon: Correct. Yes. Exactly. In this case, the evergreen portion of that, because of what went into it, is the one that outperformed the other in this scenario. Major factors being that we have those messaging concepts that everything was built around, and then also the variety and quality of the creative developed there. Now we’re actually taking it to another step, being applied–

Lauren: Or scale it out.

Brandon: Yes, across both, so a lot more tests coming out of that. I think that’s what’s ultimately driving the type of performance we want to see.

Lauren: I think brands will hear that and say, “Oh, great, I don’t have to rely on my promotional messaging.” We know nobody loves that. What you ultimately learned is, it was a combination of both the messaging and aligning to what the user needed and the way you guys actually executed the creative. A bit of both?

Brandon: Yes.

Lauren: Awesome. We’ve got just a few minutes left here. One of the things that I tend to see too, and maybe this case study, you can talk a little bit about the expansion plan, is the siloing of creative. Thinking of what you’re going to do on Meta and having a different approach to your pillars on Google Search, and then different messages on video through programmatic, how do you think about unifying all of that?

Brandon: When we’re leaning into such a creative focus from a media perspective, I think it just becomes more and more important that they’re not looked at purely individually. We’ve already mentioned that there’s a lot of similarity in the general movement across some of these platforms and how we approach things. You can imagine that if you’re doing that in a siloed manner, you’re likely to have differing concepts. You’re likely to have such a diversified message that there’s not that unity across those platforms.

Well, they should be working together. The things that we’re doing across these channels when we’re bringing in programmatic with social and search and these other channels, each one is meant to help augment the other in some fashion. We really look at these things in a blended manner. Well, the same is true for our creative and our concepts that we’re putting together. We really want to be able to take the same approach across them so that we’re learning consistently.

Now, I say all that to say that we don’t always see the same performance across those different channels. What that does is tell us a lot more about the impact that these concepts can have. It may actually be resonating much more clearly in one platform over the other because it’s easier to reach a particular segment of your audience or a particular persona that you’re trying to build up that overall brand awareness around.

Lauren: Brandon, all really helpful information. I think it’s such a mindset shift, and we know it takes time to get people there. If you could leave listeners with one place to start, if they’re maybe a little bit in the older school camp of thinking right now, what would be the first thing you would suggest that they go do, a report that they pull, or a conversation that they have, to be the catalyst for this?

Brandon: One thing that I would really highly suggest is starting to leverage in these platforms some of the testing capabilities that are there because that will help prove out what’s really working. I would say one of the most interesting takeaways might be that if you’re drawn to want to really cling to that targeting and that control, go ahead and look at your breakdowns in the reporting with very specific targeting, and you’ll find that Meta or other platforms is not actually going to deliver to just the target age group or demographic that you’re trying to target.

As soon as you start to see that, you realize the concepts that we’re talking about here are just so critical to the performance that we want to ultimately drive. I think that’s an eye-opener, honestly, when you see it from that perspective.

Lauren: Check out the audience-level reports within the platforms, compare that to who you think you’re targeting. What you’re going to find is it’s probably much broader, and the messaging needs to be adjusted accordingly.

Brandon: Exactly. You have to adjust in the environment. We want to work with these platforms, with the system, not against it. I think the more we understand that, then we’re much better positioned.

Lauren: Awesome. Thanks for joining, Brandon. Super helpful. I always learn something every time we get a chance to chat. I’ll be taking this into my next conversations. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Like, share, subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast, and we’ll see you on the next one.

Brandon: Thanks for having me.

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