The countdown to the UnAwards Winners’ Masterclass is on and John-Paul Danon, co-founder of CAN, suggests sharing successful campaign creatives could help public sector comms pros get over some common obstacles
by John-Paul Danon
Time flies – and it’s getting on for five months since I helped judge the 2019 comms2point0 UnAwards. This month we will be hearing how the winners came up with their successful campaigns and initiatives at the UnAwards Masterclass.
Behind the winning entries there are inevitably stories of the ingenious ways in which comms teams get around familiar obstacles in order to deliver something that achieved their objectives.
I work with comms folk on their digital campaigns, and these are the three obstacles they tell me they struggle the most with:
Lack of time – often resulting in frustrating compromises being made
Lack of budget – while not a barrier to creativity, the overall impact sometimes suffers
Lack of resource – “we knew we couldn’t do this on our own” is a frequent mantra
At CAN we are proud sponsors of the UnAwards and – as the Winners’ Masterclass is all about sharing – we wondered how we could support public sector comms teams to share the actual, practical means with which they tackled these barriers.
We’ve come up with two suggestions we can facilitate: access to high-performing creatives through low-cost licensing to save on the time and resource obstacles, and group-buying opportunities that deliver more programmatic advertising for your buck to save on budget.
Creative licensing – the wheel’s already been invented
Recently we worked with four London borough councils on a campaign to tackle the lack of awareness around what can and can’t be recycled locally. We worked with our partners at agency 22 Design to create an interactive digital tool, for use on social media, that tested the user’s knowledge on recycling and was tailored to each borough’s own policy.
And the stats were impressive. Over the two-week campaign, more than 4.5 million views were delivered on Facebook and Instagram. A huge 37,290 interactions were recorded, and it massively outperformed a recent video-based recycling campaign.
We realised the interactive tool itself could be ‘recycled’ – licensed by any local council to help improve their recycling rates for a fraction of the cost it took the design agency to develop it initially.
And this could also work with many of the creatives – tools, videos, artwork – I’ve seen over the 160-plus digital campaigns we’ve run with local councils over the past four years. It would certainly work with campaign creatives I’ve come across on judging duty for the UnAwards.
A small fee to license something that has already been shown to work and repurposing it for a readymade, low-cost, time-saving campaign – without the need to constantly reinvent the wheel.
Clubbing together for a real deal
If you remember, the original concept behind sites like Groupon was that each individual purchaser would get a good deal because they were buying in bulk with all the others who took up an offer.
Well, we can’t offer you cheaper laser hair removal, but our second idea to help shift the obstacles to campaign success is to offer council comms teams ‘bulk buying’ of advertising space. The four London boroughs who took part in the recycling campaign described above pooled their budgets in this way.
It leads to a lower average cost per ad, better targeting – as it’s possible to work out more quickly which groups respond best to which channels and messages when there’s more and smarter data involved – access to bigger-name websites you can’t get to on lower budgets, and stronger benchmarking and evaluations.
With many councils running campaigns on the same theme at a similar time of the year – for example Foster Care Fortnight (13-26 May) or Volunteers’ Week (1-7 June) – it just makes sense to pool resources in this way for better outcomes all round. You can read more about it all here.
What do you think? Would you be interested in licensing the recycling interactive tool – or another creative – for a campaign if it meant saving on time, budget and resource? Would you team up with other councils to share campaign costs and insights for the chance to improve engagement with your residents?
Let us know on Twitter @counciladnet or online or via email (connect@can-digital.net) – or have a word with me at the UnAwards Winners’ Masterclass. See you there if you’re lucky enough to have nabbed a ticket!
John-Paul Danon is co-founder and sales director of CAN – Council Advertising Network – and you’ll find him on Twitter at @JPDanon
Image via Wystan
