Communicatie Advies en Onderzoek in de Praktijk samenvatting

Caop Hoorcollege 1
1. What is a campaign?
Campaigns in your internship
 Think about these questions before your next seminar
 What kind of campaigns do you have in your place of work?
 What kind of building blocks do these campaigns have?
 Who gives advice in your company?
 What supports their advice (experience, theory, gut feeling)

What is a successful campaign?
 Research amongst succesful communication managers
 It reaches specific and measurable goals with a certain audience
Campaign goals:
o To inform people
o Trying to get an emotional response / trying to get people to feel something
o Reaching a behavioural change
 It does not happen by accident but is specifically designed
 Using established working principles communication (theories)

Campaign – the building process
 There is a problem that requires a communicative solution
 A client makes a briefing for a campaign team/consultant
 The briefing typically has all kinds of problems
o Too vague
o The mentioned goals are not about communication
o All kinds of detailed solutions are already proposed
 The campaign team goes to work on a campaign sketch/draft/pitch and presents this
 Based on the presentation a general approach is decided upon and the team starts to build the actual
campaign, together with the problem owner

The campaign template
• Giving advice (on communication issues)
 When was the template designed?
 One possible answer: 19th century starting point modern media campaigns
• Why?

The Golden Gate Park
• A 19th century multi-channel campaign
• Designed by Randolph Hearst
• More than 20.000 people visited opening day

19th century
• Industrialization
• Rise of nationalism
• Birth of political parties
• Birth of socialism
• Emancipation of the masses
• Rise of the media

World War 1
• Newspapers
• Magazines Attention
• Radio

, Campaign
• Aggressive
• Patriotic messages

2. Building blocks of a successful campaign
A successful campaign
Explains who the target audience(s) are
• What is the Available (or potential) audience?
• How big is the attentive audience?
• How big is the cumulative audience?
• Does the campaign reach the target audience?

Who do you target in your campaign?
Example: a campaign against drilling on the NP

A successful campaign
Makes clear which media are used and why
 Different channels have different characteristics
 Channels are ‘media’
 Different people respond differently to different channels in different situations (channel preferences)
 A medium is used for each act of transmitting information

Multimedia campaigns
• Since Antiquity
 Greek ‘Rhetorica’
 All about persuasion
 Romans perfected it
 The first models and theories about communication campaigns
 (If you get a chance, pick up De Oratore by Cicero in which the perfect political campaign is outlined)

Example: campaign to improve the reputation of Athens
(In preparation of upcoming war against Persia)

Theatre
• Comedies
• Tragedies
• Mime
• Fables
• Etc

A successful campaign
Explains what kind of messages are going to be designed and why. (Priming, agenda setting)
 More specifically all kinds of theories predict that certain content will have certain effects.
 Use those type of theories!

3. Making your approach relevant
From vague briefing to a specific approach
• The briefing typically has all kinds of problems
 Too vague
 The mentioned goals are not about communication
 All kinds of detailed solutions are already proposed
• The campaign team chooses a perspective/tack/approach and
 Starts looking for theories that offer guidance