The Making - Episode 7

A luxury brand can run perfect creative and still contradict itself, just by choosing the wrong place to run it.

In Episode 7 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Part Eight of Rules for the Marketing Communication Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey: Media Strategy and Channel Architecture.

Four rules out of fifteen. Media as half the campaign, the trust hierarchy of paid, owned and earned, the platform that loses the sale, and the experience that outlasts every campaign around it.

If your awareness numbers are climbing but trust isn't following, this one will tell you why.

Get the book: Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey - 0591343421

Watch Episodes 4, 5 and 6 first if you missed them.

Subscribe for the rest of the series.

MAD Conversations - Marketing. Advertising. Digital. Design. Ghana's commercial creativity - documented.

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review on Spotify, it helps more people find the show.

Chapters

0:00 Intro
 1:10 Why This Matters Even If You're Not a Marketer
 2:19 Part Eight: The Four Rules and How They Build
 3:20 Rule 88
 4:35 The Chef and The Courier
 6:57 What the Media Planner Knows That the Creative Director Doesn't
 9:30 Rule 91
 11:10 The Hubtel Story, Competing With MTN for the Same Billboard
 14:10 Rule 90
 17:40 Rule 99
 25:45 Rule 102
 32:00 Recap and Final Questions

Connect with Abeiku:
 LinkedIn: /samuel-ad

Follow MAD Conversations:
 Instagram: /mad.conversations_
 Facebook: /14zri1aebddTikTok: /mad.conversations
 X: https://x.com/MADConversation

Listen on:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gh/podcast
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1M5ojvM
Website: https://adverbemedia.com/shows/mad-co

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In the Akan language, there's a word which is Kwan that literally means the path or path. And the book uses it to introduce the chapter we're about to discuss today. You know, strategy defines where the campaign is going, and media architecture is the path that it takes to get there. Choose the path with the same intelligence that you choose the destination. Most organizations don't do this. They spend months chasing and choosing the destination, the insights, the positioning, the creative concepts, and then spend a fraction of that time choosing the path. As if the path doesn't shape how you arrive or not, or shapes whether you arrive or not. Well, welcome to the making, right here on Mark Conversations. This is where I sit with a book, The Rules of the Marketing Communications Executive, and I pick the hardest-hitting truth and tell you what it looks like in the real world. Professor Hinson and Giornetti put this together for every marketing communications executive. And if you're just joining us, start from episode one. Even if you're not a marketing communications executive or a professional, please don't scroll, don't leave yet. Because it may surprise you that as a business owner, as a founder, you would find this useful. And so if you haven't gotten the book and you need to read a book, get it. There's so much in there that uh I can't cover right here on the video. So it's better that you get it. So we do a read along and also improve your guide your decisions and improve your decisions. If you're a business owner, it would help you to know which marketing communications professional to hire. And if you're a marketing communications professional, it would help you to be an excellent one. So today we are in part eight of the book, which is Media Strategy and Channel Architecture. And there are 15 rules here, but as you know, we don't do all the rules, so we're going to do four. But we are going to combine two rules, which are rules 88 and 91, and we'll get into rule 90, rule 99, and 102. We'll do them separately. So we have four rules, right? We are combining two, and then we do the rest individually. So these four build a progression. Rules 88 and 91 tell you that the media is not the delivery mechanism, it's only half the campaign, and the channel you choose sends its own message. Rule 90 tells you that different types of media carry fundamentally different levels of trust. And rule 99 will tell you that the digital commerce platform is not a transaction system. It's the final argument for purchase. And finally, Rule 102 tells you that nothing communicates more durably than lived experience. So strategy, trust, commerce, experience. Rule 88, media strategy is half the campaign, not the delivery mechanism for the other half. There is a persistent organizational habit in marketing communications that treats media decisions as secondary to creative decisions. As the logistical infrastructure through which the real work of the campaign, the creative work teaches its audience. In this habit, the creative brief comes first. The creative work is developed, applied, and celebrated, and then the media plan is built to distribute it. Media planning is allocated less time, less senior attention, and less strategic investments than creative development. The media team receives the finished creative and figures out where to run it. Rule 91, the channel proves the positioning. Choose media that confirms what the brand claims. Every channel the brand appears in sends a positioning signal. The media bar is not merely a distribution decision. It is a statement about what kind of brand this is, what company it considers itself worthy of, and what social and cultural context it belongs to. A luxury brand that distributes itself indiscriminately across every available media channel is not just being inefficient. It is contradicting its own positioning through its media behavior. A premium financial services brand that runs its advertising in low credibility digital environments is undermining the trust claim its communication is designed to build. A youth culture brand that appears exclusively in traditional broadcast media is signaling that it does not actually live in the media world of the audience it claims to speak for. Declarative statement. The channel, the brand appears, incense a position signal as powerful as the creative that brands it. Choose media environments that confirm what the brand claims, not just reach the audience it needs. Think about the restaurant, your favorite restaurant. I'm sure you think it's good. Think about the chef spending time on the recipe, right? The ingredients are fresh, the presentation is deliberate. Everything about the meal has been crafted with such pristine care. And then they hand it to a delivery guy on a motorbike in a plastic container in the hot acra sand. These days is not even hot, but when it gets hot, it really gets hot. We know that. And through this acra traffic, by the time the food reaches you, it's lukewarm. The presentation is probably gone. The source has shifted. If it's pizza, you know, the pizza will be like this. The experience is nothing like what the chef intended. And you've probably been in the in-house, you've been to the restaurant fiscally, and you've seen the presentation. And it's nothing like you've received. Now imagine a different scenario. Before the chef prepares the meal, they talk to the courier, and the courier says, Listen, I know the route. The road has a lot of portals. I'm going to casually. Traffic on that stretch will add about 30 minutes. So by the time I get to the customer, anything in that flat container would have shifted. If you package it this way, it is a container. Or if you package it this way in this container with a sauce separated in this manner, with a presentation designed to survive the journey, by the time it arrives, everything will be intact. Imagine that the courier tells the chef this. The meal is the same. The ingredients are the same. But because the chef and the courier worked together before the food comes to you, it would be what the chef intended. The nice presentation that the chef presented or put together that would get to you. That's the difference between treating media as a delivery system and treating media as a strategic partner. In most organizations, however, the creative process happens first. The agency develops the big idea. The concept is sharp, the insight is real. So the client approves their work and then someone says, okay, media team, where do we run this? The media plan is built after the creative is basically finished. So media becomes the career who receives the mail and figures out how to get it there. But here's what the media planner knows that creative director often doesn't. They know which formats perform on which platforms much better. Oftentimes the creative director would know, but it is not their field. They know how audiences behave in different channels, and it's why there's a whole role to them. Media planner, media buyer. They know what gets scrolled past and what makes someone stop. They know which environments add credibility and which ones undermine it. They have data from the previous campaigns on what worked, what didn't, what the customers or what the numbers actually said about the audience behavior. The intelligence is strategic here, you know, and if the creative director doesn't consult it before developing the campaign, the work is designed in vacuum. And sometimes it's not even that the media planner isn't available, it's that the creative director doesn't want to hear it. Because they've already fallen in love with the idea. They've designed something that makes them feel a certain way. And they don't want the media planners' data to complicate that feeling for them. The ego of the idea overrides the intelligence of the channel. We talked about this in episode six. Personal taste replacing strategic judgment. So, same problem, different room. There, it was the clients killing the work because they didn't like it. Here is the creative director ignoring media reality because they are affected or they are attached to what they've made. Media and creative are not sequential, they are simultaneous. One doesn't come after the other, they work together. The decision about where the campaign will live shapes what the campaign must be. A 30-second television narrative is a completely different communication event from a social first execution. An outdoor billboard demands a different creative structure from a digital pre-roll. If the creative director knows from the start that the campaign will anchor on social, the work is designed native to that environment. If they don't know until after the concept is approved, they are adapting something that is never built for the feed and it will show. Customers are not stupid, consumers are not stupid, they know. So the most effective campaigns are built when the media planner and the creative director are in the same room from the brief stage. When the planner's knowledge of where and how the audience consumes media is shaping the creative direction alongside the strategist's insights about what the audience needs to hear. That's the chef and the career designing the meal together. So the customer gets what was intended. Now, let me take this one a step further. It's not just about when you involve media, it's about which media you choose because the channel itself sends a message. And I know this from experience. When I joined Haptail, the brand was advertising on small, low-level billboards, tucked away somewhere, very easy to miss. You know those boats. They are hiding behind some obscure places. You can't really see them. And the perception matched that people didn't really see the brand as credible, not because the product was bad or their brand was not big enough. Actually, the brand was really big. It was competing with a lot of big finance companies in this country. But because of where the brand showed up, it didn't signal that credibility. So what did I do? I changed the strategy. I approached different agencies and secured premium billboards in very premium locations, the kind of boards that major brands advertise on. At one point, I was literally competing with MTN for the same billboards. I was fighting for the same spot. And here's what happened: I didn't change the creative. Well, the creative changed, but the idea wasn't to change the creative per se. Their messaging was there was the same. What we were trying to communicate was the same. It was to buy food, purchase food, you can get this meal on half child, blah, blah, blah all of that was there. The logo was the same, it didn't change. What changed was the envelope and the perception shifted. Because when a consumer sees your brand on the same billboard that MTN is on, in the same location, in fact, on the other side of an MTN billboard campaign as huge as MTN, at the same scale, with the same production quality, something happens to their mind. They start associating your brand with that level. Not because you told them you are that level, but because where you showed up set it for you. Their channel proved the positioning for you without you having to do too much. And the reverse is equally true. A premium brand that appears in cheap, low credibility platforms is contradicting its own positioning. Like the book said, a financial services brand running ads in clattered, low trust digital environments. It's undermining the trust its communication is trying to build. And a youth brand that only appears in traditional broadcast media, like GBC, hey GBC admin, don't come for me. That brand is signaling that it doesn't live where its audience lives. The creative is the message, the channel is the envelope. And the envelope shapes how the message is received before it opens. In the medieval times when letters were sent through parodies across countries and provinces, youth, it was very profound that the kind of the seriousness that kings and kingmakers attach to and letters that they receive based on the seal that is on. So choose your channels with the same strategic rigor you choose your message with, because to the audience, the channel is really part of the message. Rule 90 Paid, owned, and earned are three different kinds of trust. Manage all three. The owned-earned paid framework is one of the most practically useful organizing principles in media strategy. Not because it neatly categorizes channels for budget allocation purposes, but because it identifies the three fundamentally different relationships a brand has with the audiences it communicates through, and therefore the three different kinds of trust that each category of media generates. Paid media, which is advertising placements, sponsored content, promoted social media posts, display advertising, is communication that organization has purchased. The audience knows this mostly they do. So the credibility of that paid media is therefore limited by the audience's awareness that it is commercially motivated. Owned media, on the other hand, which is websites or social profiles, email lists, branded content platforms, physical retail environments, essentially communication produced and controlled by the organization but consumed voluntarily by the audience. Its credibility is higher than paid media because the audience is choosing to engage rather than being interrupted. But its reach is naturally limited to the audience that already knows and cares enough to seek it out. And then earned media, which is press coverage, user-generated content, word of mouth, social sharing, influencer endorsement, that is genuinely independent. It's the category with the highest inherent credibility precisely because the organization has not purchased or controlled it. When a trusted third party communicates positively about the brand, it carries a social proof that neither paid nor owned media can manufacture a declarative statement. Paid generates awareness, owned builds relationships and creates trust. And no single category can do all three. Design your media system to work all three of them. Let me ask you something. When was the last time you bought something, anything at all? That was purely because you saw an ad for it. Not because a friend recommended it. Not because you researched it yourself. You just saw the ad and you bought it. For most of you, you can't really remember, right? And there's a reason for it. Paid media, which is your ads, your sponsored content, your promoted post, mostly generates awareness. Okay? It gets your name out there. It puts you in front of people who might not have known you existed before. And that's valuable. That's necessary. But it has a ceiling. Because the audience knows you paid for it. They know it's the brand talking about itself. And they would process it accordingly with awareness that this is commercially motivated. Paid media is useful, but it does not on its own generate trust. Now think about owned media, which is your own website, your social media profiles, your email list, your app. This is communication you produce and control, but the audience consumes it voluntarily. They choose to follow you, right? They will choose to follow your social media platform, maybe because of the content that you saw that was nice, but it was out of choice. They weren't interrupted. They chose to subscribe, they chose to visit your page. That choice changes the dynamic here. The credibility is higher because the audience is engaging rather than being interrupted. So own media deepens relationships with people who already know you. It moves them from awareness to consideration. But here is the category that changes everything. Earned media, it's related to PR. Press coverage, word of mouth, user-generated content, friend telling another friend. You need to try this. An influencer who genuinely uses the product, not because they were paid, but because they believed in it. A journalist who writes about you because the story is worth telling. This is the category with the highest inherent credibility precisely because the organization has not purchased or controlled it. Think about how this works in your own life. You see, you'd see a billboard, right, for a new restaurant. It's paid for. So you are aware. You visit their Instagram page and their food looks incredible. That is owned. Then your friend sends you a message and says, I went there last Saturday, you know, and the Jolov is the best I've had in Accra, mostly their line. But that's earned. And that's when you make that reservation. No amount of Billboards could have done what your friend's message did. And because the trust hierarchy is different, the brand's word is one thing, and the third party's word is another thing entirely. We've seen this play out in this series already. When you go back, the Minsac campaign was paid media initially. So we saw TV, sports, radio, billboards, blah blah blah, all of that. What made it a cultural phenomenon was earned. People started saying, Minsa, you know, imagine you're with, I was with my producer a few minutes ago and she sent money to her mom, and her mom called her to say, Oh, Minsa. So imagine it was at the time, and I asked her, Oh, what did you do? I sent my mom money through my bab money. Oh, you did, and she received it, it was safe. That is earned. So it entered everyday language, which is the Minsaaka campaign. It became word of mouth at scale. The paid media lit the match, but the earned media was the fire. And here's what most brands in this market get wrong. And I keep referring to this market because this is where we operate. The budget is overwhelmingly paid heavy. 80 to 90% goes to buy and placements. And then they wonder why their awareness numbers are high, but the trust isn't following. It's like someone boosting their social media platform and then or their TikTok accounts and they have hundreds of thousands of followers, right? But whenever they post, they still get two likes or 10. Let me be generous, 50 likes, right? You have 120,000 followers, but you have 10 likes. This is because you can't buy trust. You can only cultivate it through genuine product quality, genuine stakeholder relationships, and genuine communication that gives people something worth talking about. Paid generates awareness. Owned builds relationships, earned creates the trust. No single category can do all three. The discipline is designing a media system that works all of them using paid for reach, owned for depth, and earned for credibility. And whilst doing that, you do that with each category reinforcing the other. So design your media system to work all of them, not separately. We keep talking about cohesion, coherence, and all of that, all through the series. Let's get into rule 99, the penultimate. Rule number 99. The digital commerce platform is an argument for purchase. Architect it accordingly. When a consumer arrives at a digital commerce platform, which is a website and e-commerce interface and app, they have typically already been through some portion of the awareness and consideration process. They know what they are looking for. They believe there is a possibility that this brand or this platform can provide it. They are, in behavioral terms, in a state of active evaluation. They are ready to be persuaded and they are ready to be put off. Designing a digital commerce platform as a communication system rather than a transactional one changes the design questions fundamentally. Not how do we organize our product catalog, but how does the consumer at this stage of their decision process navigate to the specific product they need with the specific information displayed in the specific sequence that builds confidence rather than uncertainty. A declarative statement. A digital commerce platform is not a transactional system. It is the final argument before the purchase. So architect every page as a communication decision, not an information display. Think about the last time you were ready to buy something online, not just browsing, not going to shopping. You are ready to buy it. You had seen the ad, you had checked the reviews, and maybe a fed recommended it, right? So you knew what you wanted. You opened the website or the app, and something went wrong. Maybe the page loaded slowly. Maybe you couldn't find the specific products you were looking for. Maybe the product description was vague. It didn't have enough information to get you to commit with confidence. Maybe the photos didn't show you what you needed to see. Maybe you got to the checkout and the payment options were limited. So you closed the tab. That sale was won before you got to the platform. And it was lost on the platform. So by the time a consumer arrives at your digital commerce platform, either your website, your app, wherever, they've already done some of the work. Right? They are aware, they are interested, they are in a state of active evaluation. They are ready to be persuaded and ready to be put off, as the book put it. The platform's job is not to start the conversation, it is to close it. It's like marketing and sales. Marketing would get you in the sales to close it. And most platforms are designed as catalogues. Product name, price, photo, name it. And then add to cut. That's a transaction system. It displays information, but it doesn't persuade. It doesn't address the specific uncertainty the customer is carrying at that moment. It doesn't even provide the emotional confirmation, the social proof, or the decision support that will turn, I'm considering this into I am buying this. Think about what the consumer actually needs at this point. They don't need another ad. They've already been advertised to. They need confidence. They need to feel that this is the right product. And in a market where trust is the biggest buyer to adoption, this is critical. They need to know that this brand can be trusted. That is, if something goes wrong, there's a recourse. They need information presented in the sequence that builds certainty rather than creating more questions. They need to feel supported at the moment of commitment, not abandoned on the checkout page. In this market specifically, think about how many e-commerce experiences are abandoned, not because the consumer didn't want the product, but because the platform didn't make them confident enough to commit. I have a first-hand experience. The payment process felt uncertain. Their delivery information was vague. They asked themselves, when will it arrive? Can I trust this? The return policy was probably buried or maybe non-existent. And every one of those gaps is a communication failure. And every communication failure at this stage wastes everything the upstream campaign invested in getting the consumer to that point. The digital commerce platform is not a transactional system. Don't think about it like that. And you get the best out of it when you involve a marketing professional in the process because it is the final argument for purchase. Everything your campaign did, which is the awareness, the interest, the consideration, led to this moment. And so if the platform fails here, all the upstream investment is wasted. The art worked, the content worked, the social media worked, all the content that you are doing, dance with me, all the trends, they worked. And then the platform lost the sale because it was designed as an information display instead of a communication decision. You need to architect every page as a communication decision, not an information display, because that page is the last conversation between your brand and the consumer before they decide. So do make it count. The most powerful brand memories are not formed through advertising. They are formed through direct experience, through the encounter with the brand that is vivid enough, emotionally resonant enough, and personally relevant enough to leave a memory trace that persists long after the specific event is passed. That influences brand preference and purchase behavior months and years later. And that generates the kind of word-of-mouth advocacy that no media investment can reliably produce. Experience is the brand's most direct communication. The moment at which the promise that advertising makes is either confirmed or contradicted by reality. Design it as such. The memory it creates will at last every campaign that surrounds it. A declarative statement. Experience creates the most durable brand memories available. It's not a premium on top of the campaign. It is the most direct form of brand communication. Design it with that understanding. Today we are doing a lot of thinking. And I want you to think about a brand you have a strong relationship with. Not one you've seen ads for, one you've actually experienced. Maybe you attended their events, maybe you visited their space, maybe you interacted with their people one way or the other. And something about that encounter stayed with you. Not because it was entertaining, but because it was real, it was tangible. It involved your senses, your emotions, your physical presence, and the memory of it is more vivid than any art you've ever seen or you will ever see from that brand. MTN does this so well. And that's what this rule is about. The most powerful brand memories are not formed through just advertising. They are formed through diet experiences as well. And the difference in durability is not marginal, it is fundamental. Think about the why. When you see an ad, you are a passive observer, you process it as at a distance. Your brain evaluates it, maybe stores a fragment of that information and then moves on. But when you ex when you experience something, when you are physically present, when your senses are engaged, when you you are participating rather than just watching, the memory is encoded differently. It's deeper, it's more emotionally charged, it's more easily retrieved, and it generates something that no amount of advertising can reliably produce, which is word of mouth. You tell people about experiences, you rarely tell people about art. Now, connect this to what we discussed in episode 4. Rule 43 said the organization proposes brand meaning, but the consumer confirms it. Remember? If you don't remember, please go back. This rule is telling you where that confirmation happens most powerfully, that is. And it's not in the campaign, it's in the experience. The experience is the moment of truth that we all come to, where the promise that the advertising made is either confirmed or contradicted by reality. Think about the brands that invest heavily in beautiful campaigns and then deliver mediocre experiences or no experiences at all. You see the art and it promises something. You walk into the store and the reality doesn't match. That disconnect doesn't just disappoint, it overrides everything the advertising builds. And the memory will govern the consumer's relationship with the brand for years, long after the campaign has ended. So now think about the opposite. A brand whose experience matches or exceeds what the communication promised, and the consumer walks away, not just satisfied but surprised. They felt something, they were treated in a way that confirmed everything the brand said about itself. The consumer doesn't just come back, they recruit, they become an advocate because the experience gave them a story to tell. And you know, people trust stories that come from experience more than stories that come from advertising. This is the strategic logic of experiential marketing. Echo House does it so well. Not that events and activations are nice additions, but that they are the most durable and most credible form of brand communication available. The consumer who attended your event, interacted with your people, engaged with your product in a designed environment that expressed your values, that consumer carries brand relationships that no amount of advertising could have built in the same time frame. Advertising has its place. It creates emotions, it evokes emotions, it's great. But here is the discipline, and most brands do miss this. Experiential marketing must be designed with the same strategic rigor as any other campaign element. It starts with behavioral objectives, not entertainment goals. The experiential environment is a deliberate expression of brand positioning, not a party. And the experience must connect to the broader campaign architecture so that the memory it creates is activated and reinforced by everything that follows. Experience is the brand's most direct communication. The book's words. Maybe you were listening to this on the fly. So let me put it all together. Media is not the delivery mechanism for the campaign, it is half the campaign where your brand shows up, sends a signal as powerful as what it says when it gets there. Different types of mechanism or different types of media carry different levels of trust. And if you're only investing in paid, you are generating bare awareness, not building credibility. And I'm not saying awareness is bad. I'm saying that is not where it should end. The platform where the transaction happens is not a back-end system. It is the last piece of the persuasion structure or architecture. And if it fails, everything upstream was just a waste. And beyond all of it, the most durable brand memories are not formed through advertising alone. They are formed through experience. The moment at which every promise is either confirmed or contradicted. So choose the path with the same intelligence with which you chose the destination. Because the path shapes whether you arrive. Remember, quan. So answer me this. Where did your brand show up this month? And what did those placements say about you before a single word of your creative was read? Is your media system really working? Whether paid, owned, and trust, are they working together? Or are you only buying awareness for buying sake and wondering why trust isn't following? And when a consumer reaches your platform and is ready to buy, does the platform close the argument or lose the sale? If you can't answer any of these confidently, as a business owner, as a marketing communications professional, as a founder, this episode just showed you where the gaps are. You can also call me, I'll do some work for you. But it is not about me, it is about the book that we are dissecting together. You need to get it, it will serve as a guide for you. Uh, it is the rules of the marketing communications executive by Professor Ebohinson and Joel Nertti. Details of purchase are in the description. And there are 15 in the rules. I only discussed four. There are 11 more waiting for you. I want you to go get the book and let's learn along and build profitable businesses and do excellent work. Share this episode and drop a comment. Tell me which rule challenged you the most and do subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. This has been The Making right here on Mad Conversations. I have been your mad friend, Abeku. See you in the next one.