From great ideas to great campaigns: The Imperative of 360 Orchestration

Every day, volumes of ambitious and promising brand ideas drop on the world, and while some of them become successful campaigns, the vast majority fail to deliver on expectations and quickly sink into oblivion. 

There is a massive delta between expectations and results in the marketing world, and 89% of CMOs don't feel like they are successfully connecting with consumers through their marketing efforts*. The truth is, most great ideas do not become great campaigns. Evolution has caught up with us, and as an industry we have neglected to lean into a new reality where the fact is, that truly great and successful campaigns are always a product of cross-disciplinary ideas and teams coming together to build a whole, greater than the sum of its parts. This is the core idea behind 360 Orchestration and what we do at Mano. We believe that connected teams and ideas deliver exceptional results, and the brands of the future are the ones that embrace this idea across its marketing operations and behavior. 

A radical growth in complexity

Orchestration is the art of ensuring that all components and stakeholders on a project play in tune, towards achieving a shared vision and outcome, through cross-disciplinary transparency, to achieve integration and synergy. This was less of a critical discipline 10 years ago, when marketing was more simple and our greatest concern was integrating offline and online. As marketers today, we live in an increasingly complicated world with more specialisms and opportunities than ever before, and according to a recent Mano study, 92% of marketing professionals agree that their role and marketing in general has become more complex**. The challenge is that this growth in complexity has left marketing teams behind without guiding principles and tools to truly harness the power of the modern marketing landscape and turn complexity into opportunity.

Assembly-line mentality

Sourcing insights or great creativity is not the main issue keeping marketers awake at night (also because accessing great creative was never the problem - it's about how we treat it from inception to market that remains the problem). Today, 8 in 10 say that their toughest and most important challenge is the integration gap; between campaign stakeholders and across campaign touchpoints and activations**. Most campaigns still go through the same linear process that the industry was founded on; a disintegrated assembly line mentality that treats all ideas and campaigns the same - on a supply chain of insights, creativity, and activation. If we want to build exceptional brands, marketing and communication - we need to forfeit this antiquated system and start connecting the dots between all the parts that make up a campaign, with respect for the interdependency of creativity and activation, as two sides of the same coin, of equal importance. 

Success by design

At Mano we believe that success should happen by design, not chance. The new marketing imperative is integration through 360 orchestration - of both teams and campaigns, because it has direct impact on the entire marketing funnel; from brand building, to campaign performance to driving sales. We know that there is a solid relationship between the amount of channels and teams that integrate on a campaign, and how well a campaign performs; Gartner found that campaigns that integrated +2 channels performed 300% better on average vs single or dual channel campaigns***. The same is true for integration communication and activation; when we align our intent and communication across touchpoints and channels we build 57% more effective campaigns, and we are 31% more effective at building brand****.  

At the end of the day, brands and marketers should aim to build cohesive experiences for consumers to pull them into their world - and when campaigns click and combine seamlessly across moments and touchpoints, it elevates the consumer experience. There's mounting pressure on marketing impact, and right now our industry is bleeding resources and creativity because we have not adapted our way of thinking and operating, to this new reality. One thing is the time and money spent on the wrong strategy, with the wrong content in the wrong channels, but the real lurking threat is the talent exodus that the industry has seen recently. The marketing and advertising industry is a people business, and therefore should be people-first in how it acts and operates. To achieve this and remove the waste-gap (156 billion US dollars, equal to 26% of the global advertising budget is wasted every year*****) we need to break down the silos that have always defined our industry, to connect teams and ideas at the root, and build successful brands and campaigns by design. 

Consideration Box:

Northstar-thinking with a ladder: teams are inspired by hairy and audacious visions, but they rally around clear north-star goals that show how individual teams can contribute to a shared desired outcome. 

Build Campaign Organizations: Consider both your cross-functional capacity and capability, internally and externally, when setting the right team to build a certain project or campaign. You will never have enough of both, but understanding your shortcomings upfront can help you mitigate them. 

Try feedback-loops: Implement hand-shakes moments and formats that help channel feedback between different functions and disciplines, and thereby ensure that your creative is infused by market and media-understanding, and vice versa. 

Create a shared compass: Insights are usually the best source of connective tissue between teams. When we share insights, we are guided by a shared compass that helps foster integration by connecting work at the root. 

By: Thor Otar