Telling management their baby’s ugly

How do you tell management the reason a campaign isn’t returning the results they want is because the campaign sucks? You might as well tell them their kid’s ugly.

(I didn’t have a picture of an ugly kid - mine are too cute - so I decided to pick on @brandmilitia’s ugly dog - sorry Justin)

I usually run into this problem in two scenario’s:

1) I’ve inherited someone else’s project that was ill-fated from the beginning.

2) The objectives of the campaign mysteriously change after the campaign is launched

Inheriting someone else’s Frankenstein project.

There’s really not much you can do. The person/s often times didn’t have a clue what they were doing and wanted to use some Web 2.0 “stuff”. They get some bad advice from a vendor that wants to sell them some tactic that they don’t really know how to execute on. And since they’re already an approved vendor list for “interactive” they go with it.

There usually aren’t any clearly defined goals (other than to spend way too much money) and very rarely is it even worth spending any additional money to try and salvage it.

My advice is to kill it quickly. If the person is still with the company then delicately try and explain how the project went off base, and probably should have been done a little differently. If they’re not still with the company throw them under the bus and use this as an opportunity to show what should have been done and why the campaign was wrong.

Hitting a moving target

This is the one that gets me. You agree on the objective up front. Usually management wants an “awareness campaign” around a new product or service. They push you in to using an agency of record (which of course has won a ton of awards and costs twice as much). And before the campaign launches, management is very happy with the creative and very excited to spend god-awful amounts on the supporting media buys.

However something weird always happens right after launch. Your management comes back very frantic wanting to justify the spend to either their boss, the sales manager or both.

All of a sudden everyone goes into a frantic fire drill exercise trying to justify their existence. The best remedy for this of course is to have planned for this in advance and have put in place analytics for sound data gathering.

If that’s still not enough justification or if those steps weren’t put in place from the begining (and even if they were) you need to push back and pull out your well documented plan which states your objectives.

“This is an awareness campaign! Not lead generation you moron!”

Too often I see people afraid to stand their ground and stick by the objectives that were put in place. Or better yet stand up while the campaign is being planned and tell the Emperor that he has no clothes. If you can’t stand up to management over something like this, how do you expect to stand up to them when they want you to pull a legitimate but negative comment in the blog? Or do some other sure fire thing that will make them an example at the next “what not to do” Web 2.0 conference session.

Social media is no place for the weak of spirit.

Technorati Tags: social media, marketing, campaign, agency, advertising, FAIL,

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