5. The Hidden Secret of a Winning Media Strategy

It's been a journey.

A journey we all undertook together when my team and I headed off to Vienna for the relaunch of the much loved Digital Distillery Conference which had been on pandemic hold for a few years.

In this, the last full episode of the season, we are hearing from the very special final speaker, the inimitable Thomas Koch as he holds no bars in tearing down the facade of the weaknesses in our industry and provides key insight into how he helped to deliver the most successful marketing campaign in recent German history.

Links:
https://stopfundinghate.info/

This episode is brought to you as always by The Digital Distillery.

If you would like to get in touch with us you can head to our website or email podcast@the-digital-distillery.com

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Written, Produced & Engineered by Phil McDowell
Executive Producer: Nadia Koski
Project Leads: Dennis Kirschner

Transcript

The Hidden Secret to a Winning Media Strategy

Hello and welcome back to The Digital Distillery Podcast. I’m your host Phil McDowell and we have a cracker of an episode cooked up for you today in which we literally tell you, from a uniquely reliable source, the hidden secret to a winning media strategy. Enjoy.

[SFX] Suitcase zips, train departs...

A few short months ago we all started this trip together. A trip to Vienna to experience the rebirth of the Digital Distillery, that meeting of marketing minds that had been on a temporary pandemic hold for a few years.

[CLIP] Welcome to Vienna...

We saw the beautiful Vienna skyline from the prime position of the 25 hrs hotel rooftop bar where the conference took place, chatting and having the occasional beer break because, you know, Austria, and generally having a lovely time of it just catching up with people in real life again. You could really sense the buzz.

[SFX] Crowd buzz, cool music plays...

We heard from agency founders predicting the impact of an inevitable, albeit continuously delayed cookie-less future. 

[SFX] Cookie Crunch…

The supposed, but not really, death of the advertising agency at the hand of the inhuman efficiency of bidding bots

[SFX] Robotic sound...

The importance of storytelling in Video

And most recently the evolution of the humble television set and how we can literally track people's engagement and even brain state while watching advertising. As a bonus we discovered the reason behind a particular mysterious incarnation of a Bush Kangaroo somewhere in a little village in the Czech republic.

[SFX] Skippy theme…

And that brings us to now. The final speaker from the Vienna event.

A man who has more years in the media business than nearly any of the other speakers have had on this earth.

[Presenter ] The biggest in the german speaking media business

A man known locally as Mr. Media

[Presenter] Someone bring this man a gin and tonic….

Who came in, ordered himself a Gin & Tonic, sat down on the discussion couch on stage, and casually turned the whole conference on its head.

Now if his speech had been in English I would now simply insert the entire audio of it here and drop the mic so to speak. Although never do that, it hurts my audio engineer soul to see it… even when it’s Obama.

Anyway Mr. Media launched into a full 45 minutes of talk and It was so engaging, confronting, and downright surprising that I literally missed my train to get home rather than miss a single minute of what he had to say. 

Although that is how I ended up waiting around having a long discussion with that wine expert that astute listeners will remember from back in episode 1. So swings and roundabouts, as Dr Karl would say.

Ok. So this is a bit of a different approach from what we usually do here on the podcast but I am going to try my best to channel Mr Media here through a mix of re-telling his key points, spoiler, they were all key points, and some bits and pieces of supporting information from some of his many columns published on the german website Meedia.de. 

Links in the show notes.

Here we go. Now where is that Gin & Tonic.

[SFX] Ice cubes…

What makes a few campaigns so much more successful than the rest? How important is the overall media strategy in that success? How do you orchestrate the interplay of analog and digital media within this strategy or should you even bother?

“There are so many questions, and happily,” he says, “I am in position to be able to answer them with the help of my practically uncountable years of experience. Experience as a media consultant for a number of different companies, media, and agencies.”

And Mr Koch is not wrong. It may seem like a pretty big claim to be able to simply go ahead and answer these key questions to success. And it is a big claim. A big claim that Thomas Koch is in a pretty unique position to be able to make. Because he happens to be the man personally responsible for most successful advertising campaign in Germany. And a score more before and after. 

For Thomas Koch is the man whose campaign for the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the last election defied all odds, broke all predictions and polls, and got the current chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz, his lofty job.

Now the SPD is Germany’s oldest party and had been experiencing a largely self-inflicted downward spiral for years now. Seen as a feud-ridden, failing party, wracked by organised irresponsibility and chaotic communication 

[SFX] People arguing…

It plunged to a mere 14% in the polls as late as July (the election was in September), and it’s pretty safe to say that no one expected them to come out on top.

Enter Mr. Media.  

[SFX] Ta daaa

With his strategic campaign, the SPD market share catapulted to nearly 26% within a few short months, making it the strongest party in the country, coming out of nowhere, and taking the crown from the 16-year former reigning party, the CDU.

That’s a market share increase of 80% in less than 6 months. And, as Mr Koch is quite pleased to say, with the smallest budget of any party. How is that even possible?

[Thomas Koch] We had a client with a clear goal…

Now no small part of it was that they had a client that had an extremely clear goal, and a clear strategy in terms of content. Now this is rare, and contains an inherent lesson in itself.

Mr Koch had an agency that was creative, courageous and extremely focused. Together they built a media strategy that was completely different in all respects from anything that had been done before in Political advertising in Germany. 

The specific factors that drove this and any campaign to be successful beyond all objectives? Thomas Koch says that in his experiences, there are exactly 4 causes:

Key insight into the target group, a point of difference separating the campaign from all competing, strategy derived directly from the objectives, and importantly, the close cooperation between creative and media.

Lets start with the last point, the role of the creative in media.

[Thomas Koch] The separation of creation and media has become a disaster…

The has become a Disaster, he says, The separation of creation and media is one of the biggest sins of this whole marketing apparatus in the last 100 years. The creative element is responsible for 60% of the final success of the campaign, and only 20% the Media and the brand itself. Another 20% we can’t influence and so that's why I advocate not putting Media in the foreground, which is so often done today.

So this is really interesting and something I too have noticed the trend of these days. The majority of the attention and budget goes into the flashy things. The things that look great on the surface but don’t have a lasting impact. The slower, longer term branding centric activites being left to the wayside because the perceived return isn’t so immediate.

Mr Koch goes as far as to say that so often the media planning decisions are made before the creation is even briefed.

And that he actively searches for and only works with creatives who also have a really good eye for media. And so they exist, he says, so find them and shower them with money, they alone are worth 60% of the success of campaigns. And because only 20% of all campaigns are actually successful, and only 20% of them REALLY successful, you sure as hell want to give yourself the best edge possible if you want to win.

The second key factor Thomas Koch spoke about was that of properly utilising the key insights that you have into your target market. When undertaking the SPD campaign they knew a few key things, through actual research of course.

[Thomas Koch] We knew older voters decided the election, but that the young voters would go green…

They knew that the older voters would ultimately be the driving force of the election, but the young were still significant and would vote green. They knew that Women would be more responsive to social messages than men and above all they knew that only messages relevant to each target group would even get noticed.

So instead of designing a big expensive, one-size-fits-all campaign like all the other party’s, they decided to split the campaign down into a number of smaller, laser-focused ones. Actually they pitched it to the SPD as 100 pinprick campaigns to 100 markets. Obviously it wasn’t going to be 100 but it sounded good and after all, you can’t win on a killer idea if you can’t sell it to your client first.

And so Mr. Media and his team decided that posters worked best with the older demographic of voters, and decided that a huge proportion of that particular demographic reliably holidayed in Mallorca. They knew that that demographic was concerned about the risk of the Corona virus. And so they spent 8000€ on posters telling the German holidaymakers to go home, get vaccinated and vote SPD. He reckons these posters reached 16% of all German voters. 16%.

The next big element was the video campaign. They created a scathing and to-the-point message which demonised the opposition as an old-fashioned right-wing and ultimately an empty vessel and screened it privately at a conference of 100 journalists. From there it went viral and got an estimated reach of 26%, without spending a cent on marketing it. The money was instead spent on the creative as well as online to get the green voters, spending more there than even the Green Party itself.

By truly understanding the differences in the specific groups they were targeting, they were able to reach out to each with a tailored message and capture their attention, ultimately achieving their goal and becoming the leading party in the country.

And so, he says, we ask when can we finally be rid of this analog nonsense and focus entirely on digital? When will that day come?

In 1990 Bill Gates predicted the end of the newspaper and magazine by the year 2000, then 8 years later head of Microsoft at the time Steve Ballmer said by 2018 they would all be dead. In 10 years from now there will be no media consumption that is not over IP. Can this or should this really be true?

So let's talk about digital. Let's talk about data. It helps us to understand people's behavior and motivations. When you discover that one number that tells you a secret, reveals an insight that you can use to drive a campaign toward extraordinary success. That's the whole point right? And it's getting bigger and bigger and more and more reliable all the time right?

But what the computer lacks is empathy. It’s not so good at interpreting those hidden secrets it uncovers. For that you need people. For you have to understand that people are full of contradictions, full of secrets and make 90% of their decisions emotionally no matter how logical they think they are. And it is in understanding those contradictions and interpreting those secrets that allow you to hone in on a creative idea that might, just might push you over the edge and stand out from the noise.

What computers are great at of course is mapping a customer's journey. Reminding a customer that they haven't bought new underwear in too long or that they put a dress in a shopping cart and forgot about it, never checking out. Now, this is useful but not yet intelligent. Will AI be able to take over completely and combine mechanical memory with empathy to be able to wholly replace the human element in marketing campaigns?

[Thomas Koch] The year 2050 is the expected timeline in which we will be able to rely completely on digital media channels alone because that is when it is predicted that Artifical Intellegence will match the complexity of our own.

2050 is apparently the expected timeline for AI to reach the complexity of human intelligence but until then, says Mr. Koch, we should be very aware that we are still dealing with low intelligence machines. But people are already starting to forget or worse, ignore that.

Currently, these algorithms can figure the gender, through data, of any given person correctly at a rate of  42%. 42%. That means that the physics of a simple coin flip will beat that oh so smart algorithm everyday of the week.

According to a study the overall precision of algorithm targeting falls between 7 and 77%.

[Thomas Koch] 7%, what rubbish…

“77 ok, but 7?” He says incredulously, “Anyone’s half blind granny could do that because of the life experience and understanding of emotions inherent in being human.”

And yet constantly, he goes on, and this is where he gets a little scathing, we are seeing all these fabulous statistics from the likes of Google and Facebook about how accurate their tracking is. How much reach they have. But what does reach and tracking matter if it’s inaccurate, ignored or never even reaches a real life human at all. Facebook are blatantly lying about their performance, and have even gone to court for it.

And what about Google. They recently reported 15 Billion daily views on youtube. Rolls off the tongue nicely. But that would mean that every person on the earth including babies and the elderly, are accessing YouTube twice a day. This is ridiculous right?

We have never had such a history of communication, advertising and media. But we work with Data that we can neither verify or control. In a few years Google, Facebook and Amazon will account for 90% of all digital spending as is already happening in the US. Large parts of the print landscap has ceased to exist because they can on longer be financially viable.

And so we are looking at one of two scenarios.

[Thomas Koch] If we want to seriously look into the future we have to look at two scenarios.

The profession of Media Planner will soon be superfluous. Because we will all be feeding our relatively reliable data, ie. when its better than it is now, into algorithms that will calculate the media mix and distribution to a fine homogeneous point. And in this version of the near future there are only 3 media’s left on the planet. Google Facebook and Amazon.

The software programmes of the tech advertisers will soon resemble those of high-frequency stock exchange trading. With all companies working with the same data and the same algorithms which means that guess what, they cancel each other out. Silence.

And that is the first possible future we are looking at. We all cease to exist

The second is a little more complex. In this we gain the experience needed to figure out how to deal effectively with these digital media. After all we have 2000 years experience with posters, 400 with Newspaper, 100 with radio and 65 with TV. We barely have 20 with the internet.

No wonder we are making so many mistakes.

In this scenario we will understand that the success of a campaign doesn’t in fact depend on delivering billions of ad-impressions but rather comes from reaching people on the specific and individual platforms, messages and moments, carefully selected and emotionally understood in order to be visible at all.

And for this you need human creativity

This we have understood for decades in the analog world before we started simply raising our hands and bowing to the algorithms. And the fascinating thing about our media world today is that we have media that builds awareness, interest and brand strength. But a lot of it has its roots tied up in the traditional domain and has the potential impact and message transfer power that its purely digital counterpart lacks.

How much reach can an online campaign actually attain with an adblocker rate of 40%. We don’t talk about the fact that we can’t reach 40% of our target groups with digital alone yet with analog we can easily get 70-80%. Facebook, Apple and Google know this! They advertise heavily on TV, in newspapers and on billboards. Nike went completely digital, failed, and went back to tv, clawing their way back to life.

On top of this ad fraud devours up to 30% of the programmatic media money. The ad impressions simply being delivered to unseen bots and estimates say that the damage worldwide is as much as 86 Billion dollars.

Side note: see our ad-fraud special episode from a few weeks back to find out more.

Then there is brand safety. Advertising money that ends up in unsavory places and damages your brand. Too many people are just throwing things into algorithms without properly planning and creating.

In fact another campaign that Mr. Koch has been heavily involved in is called ‘stop funding hate’. A campaign actively raising awareness about this issue. And with that they found 1500 well-known German, 700 Swiss and 300 Austrian companies were inadvertently advertising on websites that spread hate and fake news. And most alarmingly, of the 2000 they discovered and approached only 1 in 6 self-reported the findings, as in the others apparently didn’t know about it, and when told 40% failed to fix the problem. Either due to ignorance, lack of technical ability or insufficient funds or resources.

These excuses don’t fly with Mr. Koch. Apparently Google is responsible for the overwhelming majority of display ads served on hate and fake news websites, and speaking of google, 22% of ads paid for on google aren’t delivered at all. Its unspeakable. A medium that should be so accurate. With Programmatic delivery no one is sure exactly where a campaign is running, where the brand is advertising. Every online advertiser knows this and the vast majority of them aren't doing a damn thing about it.

Phew!

If you somehow got the impression that Thomas Koch inherently has something against digital media, then you’d be wrong. He, as much as anyone, knows exactly how effective it can be but he urges us to understand it better and focus only on the effective part, eliminating the enormous rest. 

Because, as he says, consumers have never hated advertising as much as they do right now and we as advertisers need to be exceedingly deft, intentional and creative in order to not draw the ire or ignorance of our markets.

Once you have your reach and your brand recognition, loyalty and all that then these digital channels come into play and only then you can do what digital does best.

So this is it. The secret. The solution. And its quite logical but nobody does it.

Use media according to its function. Use the individual strengths of those mediums to inform your marketing and advertising objectives. Play to those strengths and find creative ways through creative people to build something specific, emotionally targeted and memorable.

And there you have it. The final speaker from The Digital Distillery in Vienna and with it the final full length episode of this season of the podcast. While we prepare for the next event taking place in Paris next year we will be bringing you a few more special episodes, wrapping up some of the themes and topics we have discussed. We might finally hear from the enigmatic executive producer of the show Nadia Koski with the long awaited story of how we got busted without tickets on the Italian public transport system.

Over the new year we are continuing to work on our new digital sustainability focused show Green About Media, our contextual advertising discussion Just For Context and 1 or 2 new ideas bubbling just under the surface.

As always you can find us on social media or contact us directly by heading to the shownotes and clicking the links. 

Looking forward to seeing you again soon, on the digital distillery podcast.