You think I just click on the ad of some brand I just met?

I love this recent article I read this morning from Marketing Week about adidas*. In my time at both Twitter and Facebook, I saw - and continue to see - this happen with a lot of brands: they focus so heavily on conversion and "performance" that they forget that they have to build brand as well. I've been told a few times by performance-focussed marketers that Facebook/Twitter "doesn't work" - and then I see their ads and strategy and it's the equivalent of some grubby stranger walking up to me and saying, "Hey, wanna go out?" You've established A, no relationship, B, you're not looking so awesome, and C, you aren't even leading with some reasons to say "yes" ;) You gotta invest in brand-building before you try to push the performance aspect. 

The advice to adidas from Les Binet & Peter Field regarding spend even reflects this thinking: "...Adidas’s advertising split was 23% into brand and 77% into performance. Yet work by Les Binet and Peter Field recommends the split be 60:40 in brand’s favour." 

Exactly. Invest in brand to grow a connection to the consumer you later want to say "yes".

The other challenge I see is that so many brands are trying to prove one particular campaign or even one ad "worked". And even on Facebook, you still need a mix of types of ads within one campaign - it's the same strategy and thinking as with any classic advertising campaign. I've never seen a brand say, "Okay, we're doing EVERYTHING in one 30' second TV ad, nothing else. Let's hope this one TV ad works." Brands support a campaign with a variety of ads in various formats to connect to different moments with their target audience - from OOH to radio to print. Same strategy needs to happen on Facebook & Instagram. It's about creating enough variety of ads - from brand building mixes to conversion mixes - to connect with a consumer at various moments in the platforms. One 15' second Instagram feed ad doth not an effective Instagram campaign make. Why did the consumer say "yes"? Odds have it, you'll never know exactly what worked, but you can have faith that it was a combination of efforts and tactics that worked together to get that outcome.

Lastly, you can't just focus on loyalty. To grow your brand (hello, Byron Sharp!), you gotta move beyond your standard audience and target a broad audience to create new customers. As adidas learned, "...where it had thought loyal customers were driving sales, and it was therefore investing in CRM, in fact 60% of revenue came from first-time buyers." If you fish in the same pool, you get the same fish. (I just made that fish thing up up, but I think I now have my TED Talk title).

Conclusion: Invest in brand advertising, use mixed assets even on Facebook/Instagram, grow your audience beyond the "usual suspects" - and ultimately be mindful of the data and KPI's that tell you what's "working" because most likely those clicks, engagements, VTRs and such aren't actually correlating to actual business impact.

I need more coffee.

*"adidas" must be all lower case or all upper case, people! ;)