And the meek shall inherit awareness

A great line in otherwise shill filled keynote today by David Carlick (Doubleclick founder/ investor). I could be mad, but he gave me this line to think about (and probably copy and take credit for) so job well done.

He was talking about how much harder it is to truly engage someone than buy a GRP at them. I interpret “harder” as expensive, time consuming and personally risky.

I think as a marketer you need to be honest about this. Each marketer needs to answer the question, “Do I want to impact tons of people a little bit (awareness), or a smaller number of perfect people a lot (engagement)”. If both, what’s more important? How do I spread my scarse resources (i.e. time, money) against these goals? This is going to vary from business to business.

But regardless of business once you make that choice I think there are some consistent best practices about how you allocate funds within the awareness and engagement filters.

Awareness = lots of media, lower investment in creative/ strategy/ and campaign stewardship.
Engagement = Creative/ Strategy/ Stewardship gets a lot more money and the media budget should shrink.

If you stick to an awareness based business model and try to generate engagement you’ll fail quickly. But if you stick with model you know and never fund engagement in a manner and scale that is logical you’ll fail slower.

And the meek shall inherit awareness and weaker brands.