Do Ad Campaigns Suffer Wear-Out?

Like, what if the campaign is still on strategy, still makes sense, but isn’t working as hard as it used to? Or it’s already been a couple years? Does that mean it’s dead?

Communicus ran the numbers on 109 campaigns that were proven to be effective over a couple of years but were then axed. 

Why were they axed? A quarter of the time, the strategy was no longer relevant. But the rest of the time the reasons were kind of arbitrary.

Then new campaigns hit the market. How’d they do?

Four in five of the new campaigns did worse than the effective campaigns they replaced. (That’s 80% for you who don’t like to be ratioed. :-) )

Only 1 in 5 of the new campaigns did as well or better than the ones they replaced.

Caveats? Of course! Small sample size; how do you assess ‘arbitrary’ reasons; how is effectiveness measured; short & long term metrics; “but this wasn’t in my category.”

Yep. Still, it’s a nice study, and it corroborates other data that show ad wear-out is less of a problem than we think. The bigger problem is that us brand marketers get bored with the same ad porridge every night, so we wanna change things up. We forget that most of our customers & prospects eat with us rarely, if ever. 

Lessons!

1. If your campaign works, DON’T KILL IT, refresh it.

2. Consider expanding your targeting, not replacing your creative.

3. Brand equity and ‘iconic assets’ are built over the long-term.

Original: https://communicus.com/is-your-campaign-worn-out-how-about-your-individual-ad-executions/