Minimum Viable Campaigns Part 1

“In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” - Steve Blank

I believe the same can be said for agencies and clients when developing marketing campaigns. A lot of the talk is based on opinions of those in the room not on facts and not on actual consumer responses.

The answer isn’t in more research either.

There’s a lot of talk in the start-up world about Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). (Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Sean Ellis are all awesome sources to learn more).

The basic premise is that any work done beyond being able to start learning what people actually think is a waste of time and resources. If it prevents you from starting to test your business model’s assumption than you are likely not being productive. A MVP allows you to go out in the real world and begin testing core assumptions about your product/service.

I’ve been wondering if the same philosophy can be applied to the marketing world? Could Minimum Viable Campaigns help prevent the creation of marketing campaigns that nobody cares about? In my opinion it really doesn’t matter if something is on budget and on time if nobody cares - it’s a waste.

The idea would be to create an MVC and test it in the real world (not with focus groups) and iterate the campaign accordingly instead of planning for the “big launch”. Strategy and Planning becomes part of the creation process rather than a long drawn out process that gets handed over to Account/Creative teams to execute.

In order for it to work it would require a significant restructuring of the client-agency relationship, how agencies operate and even how clients operate.

More thinking to come on MVCs…

Collaborative Discovery

Behind the scenes at most agencies the brainstorming process is a completely arbitrary process (never to be admitted to a client).

A select group of “brainstormers” consisting of suits, maybe a few “creative” people and maybe somoene who fits the consumer target from the agency sit in a boardroom and stare at each other blankly.

No real process or structure and not that many people involved.

Why?

It’s expensive and inefficient to try and involve lots of people in the brainstorming process. It also requires a lot of coordination. 

There might be a better way.

Collaborative discovery involves using technology to quickly generate insights and ideas from a large group of people. The idea is you have a digital tool where a question is posed and people can contribute their ideas. The technology then automatically bubbles up the best ideas based on other people’s feedback, groups like-minded thoughts together and allows for the efficient evaluation of ideas. 

Check out Hybrid Wisdom Labs developed out of UC Berkley for a tool that could be very promising in facilitating the discovery of ideas.

This could be a great tool to help agencies in the ideation process.