So you want to invest in above the line advertising. You’re looking for it to complement online advertising channels such as search, social advertising, display, and online video, as well as your owned channels and earned media. If there ever was a time your brand was going to be noticed, it’s now. You’re excited.

But how do you go about setting up your first ATL campaign? Which channels are best suited for your objectives? How do you handle media buying? Are you gonna do it yourself? And how do you get a top notch ad that works across all these different channels and touch points?

WHICH CHANNELs fit YOUR CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE?

To understand which advertising channels you should turn to, you of course wanna start by considering the campaign objective. Last summer, we ran our first ever above the line campaign that combined online advertising with radio and out of home.

For us, the objective was to introduce the idea of a campervan trip to as many last minute Summer decision-makers as possible. That basically meant we wanted to reach as many people in our target groups as we could with our budget.

When talking about cost effective mega reach, you’ll find yourself looking at radio, TV and out of home sooner rather than later. Television generally requires the largest budget of the three. Also, I knew that I didn't want to go for one of these channels in isolation but that I’d wanted to try at least a combination of two of them.

THE COMBINATION OF RADIO AND OUT OF HOME

The combination of radio and out of home is a classic one. They’re a bit like Henry and Bergkamp. Pretty darn good on their own, but world class when put together. Add to that the fact that our budget was insufficient for TV, and the choice was made.

HIGHWAY billboards OR BUS SHELTERS?

Once you know you’re going for radio and out of home, you have one more question to answer. Do you wanna be reaching out to your target audience mainly along the highway or mostly in the city?

The highway billboards we looked into here in the Netherlands are screens of 100 square meters, either digital or analog, and millions of people quickly pass by every day. If you're lucky, several times a week. So that means you’re getting a whole lot of impressions, but they are also very quick and fleeting. Combining this with radio is pretty obvious because many people still listen to the radio in their car. That makes this scenario especially appealing when reaching out to a B2B target audience who are commuting almost daily.

When it comes to outdoor advertising in the inner city, think of bus shelters and other screens in shopping streets or in and around public transport. The potential reach here is also very significant. However, you do generally need a lot more posters to reach a similar audience as with billboards at the side of the highway. For an average campaign you should think in terms of at least a 1000 posters in the city, compared to one or two handfuls of highway billboards.

One of the most meaningful differences between a highway billboard and a poster in a bus shelter or in shopping areas is the time span that comes with each touch point. A poster in a shelter is seen by people waiting for the bus or tram for minutes, but also by pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists quickly passing by. However, because it’s an urban area, cars and cyclists pass by less quickly, and they might often be waiting at a traffic light for example. Moreover, because there are often many posters in a more condensed area, you can expect multiple touch points in close proximity and within a short timespan which helps to convey your message in an effective way.

Especially if you go with posters in and around public transportation or in pedestrian areas, you get the chance to convey a much richer message than on the highway where your audience rushes by. It’s clear that both types of outdoor advertising require a different creative approach.

Are you gonna buy media yourself, or hire a media agency?

Once you know which advertising channels fit your campaign objective, the buying begins. You can basically go about this in two ways. You can do it all by yourself, or you can hire a media agency or like an agent.

Both of course have their pros and cons. In this case I personally was convinced that the buying process would present a significant learning opportunity for me and the team, so I chose to do most of it myself.

Buying RADIO ADVERTISING

For radio, I scheduled appointments with various stations to explore the landscape. Basically I just wanted to get a realistic picture of the costs and what the bandwidth of our budget was gonna be. What does a large commercial station cost? What does a government funded option cost? What if we throw a smaller station into the mix? How much room is there to negotiate?

Once we had outlined our target audiences, one of the stations no longer was an option anymore. So then it was a matter of requesting final proposals from the stations that were left. In the end, we chose a combination of 2 large government funded stations and a smaller commercial station.

This way we ended up with a combined reach, average frequency per listener, and fit with the target audience that I was happy with. We combined a very large reach station with a station that has above-average engagement from their listeners.

Buying out of home advertising

For outdoor advertising, I very similarly just started out by scheduling a few meetings following references from my network. The most important thing to consider was whether we would plan ahead and confirm a booking ahead of time, whether we would rather buy last minute.

Planning a campaign well in advance is of course convenient for obvious planning reasons and also just for your overal sanity in the process. But if you can make a last minute deal with left over ad space last minute, it can easily save you half the price. It goes without saying that that’s also a very interesting option. Because we were already super late with planning our campaign, I chose to take a gamble and go for a last-minute availability deal.

I ended up working with a company who bought the media for us. If I would want to strike a last minute deal without any help, that would be super difficult. An agent chats to these media companies daily, and they know exactly what kind of availability there might be last minute and how to negotiate for a seriously good price.

Of course, a part of your budget then goes towards that service, but again you also benefit from the fact that they buy in large volumes and their negotiating power. Moreover from a practical standpoint, it saved me a lot of work in not having to talk to multiple media providers, especially if would have had to go over last minute options on a weekly basis.

to hire an AD AGENCY oR get creative in house

Once you have bought your media, the creative work begins. So are you gonna do that yourself or will you hire an agency? That’s a decision only you can make.

Since this type of advertising is really about standing out with a spot on creative, and in the best case scenario even being memorable, we decided to go look for an agency.

Because I had sort of anticipated that this day would come at some point eventually, I already had a shortlist of agencies ready that were appealing to me for various reasons. For instance because I share their vision on branding, or because the work is just very good and has proven to be effective. In the end, I scheduled intro meetings with two agencies and then quickly made the final call.

If you haven’t dived into the agency world before, this step can take a lot of time. To illustrate, here you can find an overview of most of the marketing and advertising agencies in the Netherlands. There are a whole lot. So keep in mind that you need to make enough time for this. You’re putting your brand and campaign into someone else’s hands, so you wanna be sure you’re confident about your choice.

Picking AN AD AGENCY

For me, solid experience and a portfolio of seriously good cases from the past made the difference. As well as a proven knack for translating a strong concept into both offline and online channels.

Choosing experience over anything else is perhaps not the most ballsy of decisions. But for our business, the stakes were really quite high to make a significant impact with this campaign.

And in addition to that business responsibility, I also felt the need to prove the value of these new advertising channels.

I had been learning a lot about this type of campaigns for years and was convinced that this was the right step at the right time for our company and brand. That had to become abundantly clear in the campaign results. So then it helps to know that your agency of choice happend to have won two gold Effies very recently.

That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t consider a newer agency or even one that is just starting out. The novelty of the agency has little to say about the combined experience and talent of its team. And plus, it might be that with a newer kid on the block, you get to enjoy more direct and dedicated attention as a client.

The creative process

When it came time for the first round of creative concepts, that was really quite exciting. Even more so because I was very late with getting the agency on board, and there was really not gonna be any time to go back to the drawing board if the ideas weren’t gonna work.

Fortunately, the agency showed that they really understood the brief very well, and there were several ideas that were convincingly good. So all in all I am very happy that we went with the agency route. The outside perspective really helped to highlight what it is that makes our way of travelling so unique.

As a final note it’s good to say we're not going to do everything with the agency from now on. I am lucky enough to work with a bunch of smart and creative people who are full of excellent ideas. We are used to making all kinds of content in house, so when it comes to our next campaign we’ll combine a lot of in house work with additional support from the agency.

BRiefing, briefing, briefing

At this point I feel like it’s important to mention how crucial a good briefing is. Whether you go in house or with an agency, if your briefing is not on point, it is impossible to judge the campaign’s effectiveness, or even your creative work to begin with.

Now there’s no way you can write a good brief if you haven’t got your strategy in place. So perhaps it’s helpful if I share how we do this bit.

STRATEGIC PREPARATION

We always start by writing down the business problem or opportunity. This is the direct reason to even start thinking about a marketing campaign. Additionally, the business problem or opportunity is crucial to make everyone involved understand why the campaign is so important and that their contribution really matters.

The business problem or opportunity is then translated into a campaign objective. So for example, you might be behind on year over year revenue growth, and the coming holidays present an opportunity to correct it. The marketing objective could be: Reach X many holiday gift buyers in target group Y before Y date.

We always write out the objective in one sentence. This written objective acts as a compass we can turn to for all decisions that need to be made, strategically and creatively. Then we identify the metrics that will help us afterwards to determine to what extent we will have achieved the objective.

Setting hard and non-negotiable targets beforehand was difficult for us because we were adding these above the line channels to our campaign mix for the very first time. We still needed to learn a lot about these new channels and how they interact with the rest of the marketing mix. Is the number of people searching online for our product category gonna increase by 1% as a result of the campaign, or by 10%, or by 100%? You have to see those effects play out a few times before you can start making any useful predictions. For this first time, we were OK with taking a whole lot of time at the back end of the campaign to understand exactly what the effect was gonna be. You can read more about that in this article.

Now that we have the objective written down, we start to zero in on the target audience. Not only to define a clear target segment, but also to really understand these people. If, for example, we want to get families to book an autumn holiday, we go really deep into answering a few fundamental questions. Why do families go away this time of year? What are they looking for in a holiday? And how does the campervan option fit into that? These are simple questions, but not always easy to answer and most importantly they are fundamental for the creative work. Your agency will most likely also be grateful if you take the time for this type of thing. To find answers about our target audiences, we dive into our customer surveys and interviews, use secondary research, and dive into case studies. It’s really a whole lot of fun.

So at this point we have our business problem and or opportunity, we have our marketing objective and we have our target audience. Add to that a timeframe and a budget, and you’re good to go for the briefing.

Oh and if you don’t have these things in place yet but you’re already looking into any type of advertising channels, you’re doing it the wrong way around. That’s like picking out your tools before knowing what needs fixing.

THE SHORT VERSION FOR SLEEPYHEADS

If you’re considering investing in above the line channels, you must first answer a few important questions:

• What marketing objective follows from your business problem or opportunity?

• What channels fit in with this and your target audience?

• If those are ATL channels, which ones best work with your objective? Radio, TV, out of home, or a combination?

• Are you going to buy media yourself, or hire an agency?

• Are you going to work on the creatives in house, or hire an agency?

• Make sure you set up the campaign in such a way that you can really prove its effectiveness afterwards and learn as much as possible

A SERIES ABOUT ATL CAMPAIGNS

This is the second article in a three-part series about above the line advertising. Keep reading:

Part 1: Why would you consider above the line advertising?

Part 3: How do you measure the result of your above the line campaign?