How digital channels can help build a brand

Oliver Feldwick
Source: WARC Best Practice, April 2018
Downloaded from WARC

Explains how digital channels, when used well, can play a fundamental and complementary role in
brand building.

According to the IPA’s Media In Focus report, time online has quadrupled between 2007 and
2016, with total internet time coming close to the amount of time spent with TV.
A creative brand idea needs to be conceived with digital in mind and making feed-friendly work
that is designed for digital is essential.
Building brands in digital requires a mix of paid media, PR outreach and influence, and ideally
some organic amplification to get a consistent, measurable scale and achieve the excess share-
of-voice needed to build a brand.
Measurement is critical to both prove that your good work works, but also to understand why,
enhance it and repeat it – if you cannot prove a positive brand impact it will be hard to make the
case to repeat it.

Jump to:
Definitions | Where to start | Essentials | Checklist | Case studies | Further reading

This paper will focus on how digital channels and formats can best be used to build a brand. It explains how
digital channels, when used well, can play a fundamental and complementary role in brand building.

Definitions
This paper will predominantly focus on paid digital media and its potential to deliver brand impact and achieve
brand objectives.

It will have relevance for video-on-demand, in-read video, static and dynamic display, paid social, organic social
and owned content.

It has less focus on community management or digital utility brand building approaches, although those will also
have relevance.

Where to start
There has been a phenomenal amount of disruption over the past 10 years, much of which is prompted by the
exponential growth of all-things digital. In terms of marketing, digital has radically changed how the marketing
ecosystem works, how brands are built, discovered and shared as well as how agencies and marketing
departments work. But more importantly than that, it has also radically transformed how people live today.

Consumers have shifted a phenomenal amount of their time and behaviours online. According to the IPA’s
Media In Focus report, authored by industry experts Les Binet and Peter Field, time online has quadrupled
since 2007 and 2016, with total internet time coming close to the amount of time spent with TV, and overall video
as the dominant way that content is consumed.

Digital advertising began life primarily as a response-led medium. The emphasis was on the click and the short-
term measurable impact. A lot of effort and innovation went into getting ever closer to connect the click to the
sale. This led to an explosion of interruptive formats such as the banner ad, the interstitial, and the pop-up, all
chasing the elusive click. Which meant oftentimes marketers were arguably chasing the wrong metrics. By
focusing on the short-term, we may have risked overlooking the complementary and integral brand building
potential of digital. Or even worse than that, doing the wrong thing with digital, using it as a tool that drives short-
term performance but at the expense of the brand.

Nielsen’s Brand Effect study shows no strong correlation between clicks and any meaningful brand metric,
showing how the obsession with clicks has, at best, distracted us from brand building.

Source: Nielsen BrandEffect meta-analysis of 478 online global campaigns that ran between Oct 2014 – April
2015

Meanwhile, Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Brand Officer, has expressed dissatisfaction with the
disappointing results of the company’s digital marketing efforts and said he was concerned with the
“murkiness and waste” i.e. fraud and lack of transparency in the digital environment. What’s more, Pritchard and
other high-profile marketers are concerned about brand safety – where advertising appears on unfavourable
websites that do not align with brand values and therefore could have a negative impact on a brand.

Pritchard’s January 2017 speech was, some say, a wake-up call to the industry and a lot of marketers and
agencies have started to do some soul-searching on whether what they do is really contributing positively to the
brand. We are increasingly approaching digital as a fully integrated brand building channel, rather than a siloed
performance led function. This leads to better unified strategy and measurement, letting us see the full impact
(or lack of impact) that digital, alongside other channels, is having on the brand.

If we look at what brands need to grow, it predominantly boils down to a few common themes. While there is
much debate around the specifics it is widely agreed that the following ingredients are integral to building a
brand that consumers love:

Fame
Emotional associations
Distinctiveness
A compelling brand narrative

The IPA’s 2017 Media In Focus report shows that the old principles of brand building still remain roughly the
same, namely:

Brands still need a 60/40 mix of brand building and activation

Video is a powerful tool to build brands (be that TV or digital video, both playing complementary roles)
Reach, fame and emotion are all pillars to brand building

Luckily, digital offers the tools to do this in spades, if done correctly. However, the mechanics and measurement
of digital often struggles to account for these brand impacts, meaning that it is harder to set out with an aim to
build brands with digital channels.

Essentials
Ultimately, we need to move from focusing on digital marketing, to understanding how to do marketing in a digital
world. It is only by looking at the broader strategic context that we can identify the strengths, weaknesses and
opportunities in digital for your brand. There are four key pillars to building a brand in digital which are explored
here.

1. Play to the strengths of digital while avoiding the pitfalls

While it is possible to simply optimise any idea for digital, this is generally not enough to make consistently good
digital work. At the heart of it, a creative brand idea needs to be conceived with digital in mind.

Digital has weaved its way throughout life, becoming an oracle for any question, all-purpose entertainer for any
situation, a ubiquitous supercomputer in our pockets and a vehicle for many new innovations, apps and
services. This means that brands need to understand the role of digital in consumers’ lives and play to it.

There are five key strengths of digital that brands should consider and play to:

1. Immediate: how can your brand be the ‘just-in-time’ solution to any problem, question or need? (Even if that
need is entertainment or distraction)
a. And importantly, how can you avoid being a distraction or a frustration in this time of need?
 2. Intimate: how can your brand speak to consumers directly, recognising and reflecting what you know about
them?
a. Yet avoiding overstepping the mark, becoming creepy or intrusive?

3. Interactive: how can your brand invite participation, response, sharing or playing?
a. But without chasing meaningless engagement or chasing it for the sake of it?

4. Immersive: how can you create a brand experience that consumers want to immerse themselves in?
a. While also bearing in mind that most of the time people aren’t looking for an immersive experience?

5. Innovative: how can your brand do something inspiring, unexpected or imaginative using innovation?
a. Although avoiding chasing innovation for the sake of it, or simply not getting it?

Different platforms and formats play to these strengths differently. Most brands will want to spread their effort
across these different roles, but there is a hierarchy, from the shorter-form, lower-involvement end, before
getting to the more involved end of the spectrum. Brands often make the mistake of expecting people to dive
straight into big immersive experiences and to lap up every piece of innovation.

Mobile consumption patterns from Facebook show that roughly 70% of the time is a lean forward, immediate
consumption moment, while 30% of the time can be a more immersive ‘lean back’. This can help give us a
weighting for our content.

Source: Author's own, based on Facebook Creative Shops 70-20-10 model

2. Make feed-friendly work that is designed for digital

Whenever there is media innovation, there is a transitionary learning period as we adapt. The first ever radio ad
in 1922 for AT&T was simply a 15 minute broadcast of an article being read aloud. The first ever TV ad, for
Bulova watches, was simply an audio ad with a picture being held up.

These evolved into common-sense creative considerations – you don’t put a long copy execution on a roadside
48 sheet outdoor campaign. You don’t put a 30 second ad on an escalator panel.

In the early days of digital, people have predominantly repurposed assets to fit the new formats and contexts it
will be consumed in i.e. putting print concepts in display or TV concepts in video.

However, it stands to reason that a mobile is not simply a small TV. Digital content is consumed differently.

Research from Facebook IQ and MetrixLab on what ads get looked at in-feed gives us some clear guidelines
on what we need to do differently to respect and fit with how content is consumed online.

Simply put, if people are watching your work on smaller screens, while distracted, potentially in silent mode, then
you need some different common-sense considerations, such as:

Integrate the brand into the narrative early, but in a meaningful way
Land the main message sooner rather than later
Make it as long as you need to, and as short as you can get away with (there is no strong relationship
between viewthrough-rate and brand recall)
Tell feed-friendly stories, which capture engagement initially but continually rewards continued
engagements with heartbeats of story
Respect the context you will be consumed in – public spaces, small screens, 1x1 or vertical (and critically,
review your work in a similar context to assess whether it works!)

3. Understand and utilise the digital ecosystem

Having come up with good digital creative, designed so that it will work well in the digital environment, we now
need to get it out to the intended audience, and beyond.

Digital offers a range of different ways to do this. But one of the dangerous myths that’s evolved is that organic
sharing and viral reach is a viable strategy to pursue. While this can, and does, happen it has proven all but
impossible to pursue as a reliable strategy. Building brands in digital requires a mix of paid media, PR outreach
and influence and ideally some organic amplification to get a consistent, measurable scale and achieve the
excess share-of-voice needed to build a brand.

Programmatic has been another hugely influential invention. Brands need to fully understand the implications of
deploying campaigns programmatically. Individual, one-to-one marketing at scale can be a powerful tool –
however, its potential is only realised if the creative idea is built for personalisation. Done poorly, we risk eroding
brand effectiveness, alienating consumers and inadvertently stalking them around the web. Using programmatic
in a brand building way requires a skilful balance of human and machine, working in tandem.

Digital brand building needs to be more than just a rush to personalised and individual marketing messages. It
must be used as a tool for creating brand building shared experiences, events and content that can speak to
many, not just a few. This centrally created content, locally amplified and enhanced, can create big PR-able
events, shareable content and scalable brand impact through digital.

4. Use a measurement approach that links digital to brand, and to value

Lastly, measurement is critical to both prove that your good work works, but also to understand why, enhance it
and repeat it. If you cannot prove a positive brand impact it will be hard to make the case to repeat it – especially
if other proxy metrics or performance data don’t back you up.

Measurement online can feel like the best of times and the worst of times. We have a trove of data at our
fingertips, but getting to clarity around it is difficult.

Short-term metrics can lead to activity being changed or pulled before its brand impact can be assessed. This
can result in doing what is easy to measure, not what matters most.

Another challenge is that many platforms come with their own suite of measurement tools. Digital performance
reports can be an array of data that doesn’t line up with your actual business objective, making it harder than
ever to really understand if your campaign is working as intended.

To avoid this, marketers must develop a clear and consistent framework to measure the expected impact on the
brand.

Often, digital spend is still below the levels where the impact on a big brand is clearly visible in a major brand
tracker. However, looking at this, alongside specific digital brand lift studies, will start to build a clearer picture of
whether your digital activity is playing the desired complementary role in brand building.

As Les Binet and Peter Field, put it, “a balanced scorecard of long and short-term metrics is essential to avoid
prejudices towards either. Price elasticity and buzz metrics are good examples of the former; short-term sales
and click-through rates are good examples of the latter. Most digital metrics, whether search volumes, click-
through rates, web traffic, likes, tweets or mentions, are volume based and short-term”

So in order to make sure we can monitor, measure and celebrate the brand impact of our digital campaign, we
need a platform neutral, balanced set of measures that look at both long and short term impacts. This can mean
mixing specific brand lift studies alongside specific campaigns, linking your digital activity into your brand
tracking and focusing on some transparent proxy measures that operate as useful leading indicators for your
brand goals.

Checklist
1. Get to a clear understanding of the role of digital in building your brand
2. Ensure that you come up with ideas that are a mix of Immediate, Intimate, Interactive, Immersive and
Innovative engagements
3. Create them in a way that is feed-friendly, integrating the brand throughout and respecting the context it will
be experienced in
4. Make the right use of digital media to balance programmatic and personalisation, while still getting reach,
share of voice and cultural traction
5. Outline a clear measurement approach that balances short-term and long-term goals

Case studies
Nike: Building a digital brand

Nike have always been at the forefront of creating a range of assets that live and breathe effortlessly in digital.
In particular, the company have worked well to create campaigns to play to the myriad strengths of digital:
creating short, interruptive activity that keeps the brand in front of consumers, creating intimate
retargeting conversations based around consumer interests, building big immersive content like the recent
LDNR execution (despite running into legal challenges with the name of the film) the Breaking2 event, and
a steady stream of ongoing highly valued innovation, from Nike Training Club, to the Fuel Band and the NikeID.

This continual reinvention and experimentation has meant it creates great – and effective – work.
Image: YouTube, 2018

The Economist: Raising Eyebrows and Subscriptions

By coming up with a powerful campaign idea that could live across digital, The Economist, an international news
publication, used the data and targeting opportunities to make an idea that was intimate & immediate. Embracing
the strengths of programmatic display, while avoiding the pitfalls, it created compelling and immediately relevant
creative. And by linking it to a specific audience, having a clear concept of the intermediate measures, and the
confidence to stick to the campaign, it saw short, mid and long-term brand and sales results.

Using the potential of programmatic to great effect, targeting ‘progressives’ and getting them to reappraise The
Economist, it used dynamic digital display advertising to provoke a reaction based on editorial content,
contextually relevant topics and witty, on-brand copy. Instead of hitting its target of 660,000 clicks, it achieved
5.2 million, delivering 64,000 new subscribers and £51.7m of lifetime revenue.

Source: Advertising Works 23 Case Study

Read more in: The Economist: Raising Eyebrows and Subscriptions, Gold, The Channon Prize for Best
New Learning, IPA Effectiveness Awards, 2016

Lexus: Hoverboard
Lexus, the luxury automotive brand, used a central, iconic, audacious piece of innovation to create some
immersive content that could kick-start a global conversation.

Rather than buying and deploying media in all of its markets, a central content phenomenon helped lift the brand
globally, with the Hoverboard.

Having a big, audacious creative idea at the heart of it was integral to capture imaginations. By linking into
culture with an idea that understood what made people tick in digital, it had strong traction that helped tease and
build the campaign.

It was distributed to global influencer and press networks, to get $56m worth of media coverage, over 1.7 billion
online impressions and global press coverage off a $0 media spend. This has since helped support sales in
local markets, contributing to one of Lexus’ best sales performances in the year of the Hoverboard.

Source: YouTube, Mashable and Wired

Read more in: The Lexus ‘Hoverboard’ and the future of online video, Event Report, Cannes Lions, June
2016

LEGO: The Building Bricks of Imagination

Brand Finance found LEGO to be the world’s most valuable toy brand in 2017, while clearly built on top of a
fantastic, well-loved and carefully crafted product, a sizable part of this success has been in how the brand has
continued to build and innovate in digital.

Although a late social bloomer, Adweek scored LEGO as the number one brand on social media, using
feed-friendly content and a digitally savvy presence to have a meaningful role in consumers’ digital lives. This
goes from simple and elegant digital display advertising, all the way up to innovative and disruptive augmented
reality LEGO studio tools.

With over 1.2m pieces of user-generated content and over 3.7m subscribers to the brands YouTube channel, it
has built a strong following through its digital work.

LEGO achieved this, in part, because a clear role for digital was articulated at a strategic level, allowing them a
clear framework to support and continue to invest in digital brand building activity over time.
Source: Econsultancy blog

In summary

While none of this is revolutionary, it should help build on what we already know as experienced marketers, but
reapplies it to the context of digital brand building. Using digital to build brands shouldn’t be an afterthought or a
distraction, but should be part of how we work with brands in the modern age.

Digital can play a powerful complementary role in brand building, however to do that, you need creative ideas
that are designed to play to the strength of digital, getting the balance right between immediacy and interactivity,
it needs to be crafted in a feed-friendly way to ensure it works well in the environment that it is distributed in.
Finally, it is also critical that brand objectives and a measurement framework to support them are built into the
work to ensure that the work has the chance to work, but that it can also be proven to work and repeated.

Further reading
WARC Topic: Digital media

WARC Topic: Brand growth

WARC Case Studies: Case study finder

WARC Data: Adspend data

Econsultancy blog

How to balance long-term and short-term strategies, Les Binet and Peter Field, WARC Exclusive, June
2013

Media In Focus

FacebookIQ

Facebook and MetrixLabs: Stand Out In Feed

About the author

Oliver Feldwick
Head of digital strategy, CHI & Partners
oliver.feldwick@chiandpartners.com

Oliver Feldwick is Head of Digital Strategy at The&Partnership London, where he helps develop digital strategy
and creative across the business.

He won the 2016 Admap Prize for his essay The Uncanny Valley of Personalisation, has spoken at the APG,
and presents on the Fundamentals of Branding with the IPA.

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