Context Is King

I recently opened up LinkedIn, and as I began to scroll through my feed two posts caught my attention right away. The first proclaimed that creative is the most important aspect of paid media as platforms lean further into automating routine tasks. The second post made a similar claim, but the focus of this author was centered around data inputs and management instead of ad creative.

Both posts were making an argument that one individual component of marketing was more important than all of its counterparts, and an increased investment there would yield outsized returns. Should brands worry about figuring out what their top priority should be among individual marketing components like creative/data/measurement/etc…, or is there a different approach that might be more helpful?

My experience in the paid media industry has contributed to the viewpoint I carry on this subject.

Over the course of my agency career I’ve worked with a wide range of clients varying in size and industry, but I’ve found many organizations have one thing in common; segmented marketing responsibilities across many stakeholders cap the business’s potential revenue growth.

Organizational complexity varies company to company, but some brands have different partners or vendors across media buying, creative development, measurement, project management, strategy, and more. Each of the stakeholders owning these segmented responsibilities might have different:

• Working styles

• Cost structures

• Delivery timelines

• Levels of visibility into overarching business goals and strategy

Structures like this can lead to an overemphasis on individual marketing components. The creative agency might be making the case that thoughtfully designed ads have the greatest impact on marketing performance, simply because they don’t have the visibility or exposure to other parts of the marketing process. When stakeholders have a limited view of the marketing system in place, their reality is more susceptible to distortion.

I’ve seen many organizations develop a marketing objective internally, and details for that objective are disseminated across stakeholders. Teams owning creative, media, measurement, UX, pricing, and others then all work separately to craft their deliverables based on their own best practices and insights. The unintentional consequence of these siloed workstreams is performance purgatory. The campaign’s CPA/ROAS/LTV:CAC/etc… seems to be stuck regardless of the changes individual teams are making.

It doesn’t matter how good the creative is if it’s targeting the wrong audience, or the product isn’t priced appropriately, or the landing page is confusing, or the checkout process is clunky. Each of the stakeholders responsible for items like these can optimize their piece of the customer journey over and over, but they may struggle to do so effectively without the context of the entire system in place.

The advertising agency might spend all day testing new campaign structures or bidding strategies, without ever knowing that the checkout process is 20 steps long because they’ve never tested it themselves.

The creative agency might have developed a robust testing framework across 10 different hook variations, without ever speaking to existing customers to understand what offer they actually find most appealing.

I’ve seen this play out in different flavors on many occasions. After witnessing these scenarios unfold, it is my belief that marketers don’t necessarily need to focus all of their attention on one specific aspect of marketing, but rather the impact that teams can drive when they work harmoniously together toward a common vision.

Context is king.

When all stakeholders involved in a marketing campaign are well versed in the offer being promoted, the customer research associated with the offer, and the insight-driven customer journey map, the collective team can build a strong foundation from which to move forward. This foundation will provide the context around expectations for what the creative should speak to, what ad channels should be incorporated, and what the user experience on the site should encompass. Additional levels of context help to guide optimizations to generate more impactful results.

Instead of trying to squeeze every last bit of value out of a creative agency, or data engineering team, or ad platform specialist; it might be more beneficial to improve the collaboration between these teams by aligning them all to the same vision. This can be done across organizations of all sizes by having a central decision maker spearheading any particular marketing effort. The job of this decision maker is to facilitate both knowledge and communication across teams. However, it’s more than project management, the person occupying this role should have a strong grasp of the strategy behind the effort(s) they’re owning.

When all parts of a marketing system are working together and moving in the same direction, the potential for growth is much larger than doubling down in one specific area.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).