Why deliver a display campaign as fast as possible rather than evenly during the campaign period?
Last week we considered the benefits for a direct response campaign, to generate sales faster. This week we will look at a branding campaign.
If your campaign objective is to deliver a rather complicated message, sometimes we use sequential messaging to deliver it in little pieces, one at a time. Through traditional media, these would be delivered sequentially over time assuming everyone consumes media similarly. For example, creative one would run for one or two weeks in print or television, followed by creative two for a similar period after that.
However, with all media, we know there are heavy and light users. Actually, syndicated media research usually split them into terstiles or quintiles ranging from light to heavy users. This is the same online. Often times the 80/20 rule comes into effect where the 20% heaviest users actually represent 80% of all media time spent. This is pretty much the same online.
Keeping in mind the heavy and light users, regardless of media platform, you can see that heavy users would be heavily exposed to creative number one over a two week period (for example) and light users may have barely even noticed it. Over the course of a multi creative campaign, all delivered sequentially, it isn’t hard to realize that light users may actually notice the campaign on the second or third creative, but by then they haven’t had the benefit of the unfolding story, just this one message quite out of sequence.
One of the many benefits of online display advertising is the ability to frequency cap and to deliver at the pace desired. You could plan your online campaign as you would other media (creative one in weeks one and two, etc…), but that wouldn’t be taking advantage of the web’s potential. Setting up your campaign with all your creative in sequential order (with the desired frequency for each) to run as fast a possible will reach each behavior (heavy and light users) at their own pace.
What will result is that the heavy users will run through you sequence a lot faster than the light users. Is that a bad thing? I would argue that it is not. Why? Because you will see results faster whatever your exact objective was. Getting your target audience to like you faster, to increase their intent to buy faster or to change how they perceive your brand faster are all good things. Once these are achieved, you can then take these potential clients along to the next step in your communications program sooner, inching them closer to a sale.
