Kim Mickenberg

Kim Mickenberg, Partner, Campaign Design, recently wrote a piece that was published in Advertising Week, where she breaks down how human effort is still the real differentiator in crafting breakthrough campaigns. Read her full article below, or check it out directly at Advertising Week.

Look, I’m a writer by trade. Throughout my career, I’ve gone from editorial to strategic communications to brand and campaign development, and through it all I’ve been very passionate about the importance of two things: having something sharp and differentiating to say, and saying it clearly.

The rise of AI-generated content complicates the picture, but not in a way that’s necessarily bad.

But AI isn’t really what I want to talk about, at least not directly. In fact, I’ve been very adamant about the fact that I don’t want to write thought leadership pieces about AI. To start, there are already too many. Second, I’m a writer, not an engineer, and I think many of the most salient applications of AI are in technology, healthcare, and automation, not creative inspiration. And third, no matter how you get your work done—whether you’re an AI power user or someone who just asks it for restaurant recommendations on the weekend—there are no shortcuts on the road to greatness.

Zero. Zilch. None. (None!)

If you want to get to greatness, you have to get there the old-fashioned way, because that’s the only way that exists.

Consider the environment we’re all in. Most businesses are managing quarter to quarter, most teams are hyper-attuned to data and analytics, and most marketers are being pressured to produce more with less—and faster than ever. At the same time, your audience’s attention is fragmented, and we (all of us) have much less control over what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it than we’d like.

AI can seem like an easy way out—a way to get in front of your audience early and often with minimal force and maximum velocity. Anyone can type a prompt and get something that sounds fairly reputable, and anyone can now scale that content to deliver perfectly acceptable-seeming creative to fill a media plan. So that’s what many brands are doing.

That’s also why they’re not breaking through. Because if you want to truly connect, you need something you can’t easily outsource or fake: a strong point of view and the conviction to stick by it.

And delivering that takes a lot of real human work.

To start, you have to deeply understand your audience, what motivates them, and what they need—not just what they need in a material sense, but in a higher-order, emotional one. Henry Ford is often quoted as saying that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse.” Similarly, your audience might have certain conscious wants that they’re happy to share with you. But to be truly visionary as a company, you have to go a step deeper and get a handle on the deeper human need they have—and that only you can address.

For example, I’m a parent with two relatively undomesticated little kids. If you ask me what I need at dinnertime, I might say things like, “kids who actually listen to me” or “food that doesn’t create crumbs” (I’m looking at you, Whole Foods cornbread). But if you actually observed my life and the fact that I make like three separate dinners each night to appeal to everyone’s different tastes, you might approach me differently. Instead of telling me—bloodlessly—that you have a product to make mealtime “more efficient,” you might realize that mealtime makes me feel frenetic and overtaxed and say, “Stop feeling like a short-order cook!” And you know what? If you said that, you’d get my attention.

But I digress!

Beyond understanding your audience, you have to deeply understand the business part of the business, including everything about what you offer, how you operate, and where you’re headed. It’s tempting to stay at 36,000 feet, a safe cruising altitude for anyone who isn’t super technical. But if you stay too far out of the weeds (or depend on AI-generated summaries to guide you), you miss the nuance and the nitty-gritty details that help you build a more compelling overarching story. That’s why we always ask to speak to engineers and product teams. Not because we think they’ll solve a positioning exercise on their own, but because the information they provide makes it possible for us to build a positioning and messaging framework that has real teeth and genuinely sets their offering apart.

Next, you have to come up with an idea that’s powerful enough to speak to your audience’s unmet needs: an idea that’s strong, simple, and bold—one that reflects both who you are and who you aspire to be, and that can be developed and delivered in a compelling way across every channel and throughout the entire funnel.

It’s gotta make for an awesome :30 spot. A heart-stopping billboard. A viral TikTok. A millennial-coded Instagram post. An elevator ad that your execs see and love. And ideally, at least one activation large enough to see your logo from space.

Oh, and you have to sell that idea in. To dozens of stakeholders, in every part of the business, all while keeping it intact and interesting.

That’s a tall order, a ton of work, and (usually) many, many variations of the same deck. And it’s not something a chatbot can do on its own.

But doing it pays off!

Want proof? Look at FactSet. A few years after launching our first brand campaign with them—which increased brand awareness by 280%, leading to a 438% increase in marketing qualified leads and a 76% increase in consideration—they needed to shift their positioning to reflect the org’s focus on AI and speak to the needs of enterprise buyers. After digging into the actual tensions of the AI era for financial professionals, we found that while everyone wanted to integrate AI and work faster, they were very concerned about accuracy. (And rightfully so! One hallucination or misinterpretation of sentiment could be a disaster for people whose job it is to be right.)

So for our follow-up campaign, we decided to focus on a new POV that FactSet could uniquely own: AI is only as good as the expertise behind it—and FactSet has some of the best in the industry. That became the basis for our “Fluent in Finance” campaign, which takes a humorous, absurdist look at what happens when AI doesn’t quite “get it.” In outright defiance of category norms, the campaign creative did not mention any products or services at all; it just shared a POV on what financial professionals need to succeed, with the goal of speaking to an emotional need that no one else was.

It has been a resounding success: The campaign drove very high engagement on every channel right out of the gate, increasing favorability +19 points (vs. a +1.8-point benchmark), familiarity +16 points (vs. a +1.1-point benchmark), and consideration +12 points (vs. a +1.4-point benchmark). But more importantly, it drove actual business results and was cited in a Q2 earnings call as “generating strong top-of-funnel growth.”

To develop Fluent in Finance, we interviewed the CTO, talked to the product team, did a landscape audit, wrestled with the right singular thing to own, and pressure-tested ideas a million ways to Sunday. If it sounds like it took a lot of human work, it’s because it did—and that’s before we even got to production and the challenge of making the creative really sing.

But all that hard work—and the friction it entails—is what makes it possible to find the right big idea and POV. And landing that plane actually makes everything else that much easier.

When you know who you are and you’re committed to what you’re saying, reproducing content at scale is much simpler.

When you get brand and business alignment, product and marketing naturally row in the same direction.

When your audience sees your conviction, you give them a reason to believe in your company.

And all that goodness helps you build trust and credibility at the top of the funnel, which makes it easier to convince and convert audiences throughout it.

In other words, your life gets easier! And that’s a very, very good thing, because you’ve got enough to do.

That’s why, even though the world is inundated in AI slop, and even though every seven minutes I see a new LinkedIn post about how “writing is dead”—you know the type: one with 27 hard returns, with a suspicious amount of conviction about em dashes—I’ve never felt more excited about the potential for big, smart, creative ideas and the ways we can use technology to amplify them. There are just no shortcuts to get there. But that’s OK! Shortcuts are overrated. Nothing worth having comes easy.

Don’t believe the hype; believe the work.

So you did it: You finished the hard work of figuring out who you are and what you stand for, and now you’re ready to launch that identity in the world. Good job! Now comes the fun part: introducing (or reintroducing) yourself with a brand launch campaign. 

At VSA, we come at all of our work—whether it’s strategy, design, or advertising—through a brand-first lens. Brand launch campaigns, to us, are not just a culmination of the process to define yourself, but also the beginning of a new dialogue with your target audience, where you stake out a point of view, convey what makes you different, and commit to delivering on it at every touchpoint. 

Fortunately, there are some tried-and-true steps you can take to do it effectively so you can build momentum that carries all the way down the funnel. 

First and foremost: When developing the advertising itself, align on the boldest, spiciest POV you can find. One that’s true to your brand positioning and value proposition but designed to connect with your audience on something they actually care about. 

What do I mean by that? It can be tempting to see a launch campaign as a direct reinterpretation of the brand strategy and a chance to tell the world what you do. But we think that if you do that, you miss the opportunity to make the right kind of impact, earn the best kind of attention, and lay the foundation for an entirely new relationship with your audience. 

Here’s why: Imagine being at a party. One person comes up to you and says, “Hi, I’m Kim. I lead a campaign practice for a leading creative agency that’s based in Chicago and works with top brands from all over the country. Want to hear about what makes me awesome?” 

Versus another who sees you looking for an outlet to plug in your phone and says, “Hey! It’s impossible to find outlets in this joint—lemme show you the place to go.” 

Or even a third, who sees you looking uneasily at the snack table and makes a joke about what the host is going to do with three pounds of leftover hummus. 

Who do you want to talk to and engage with? Who do you intuitively like more? The person who talks about themselves or the one who connects with you?

For me, it’s the second, and my philosophy about campaigns flows out of that belief. If you want a two-way relationship, you can’t make it all about you. 

Advertising is necessarily a disruption—a way of waving your hands to try to get someone’s attention while they’re doing other things. You need to provide some kind of emotional alignment with your audience to get them to engage, and the best way to do that is to prove your commitment to making something they care about better or providing some kind of value they can’t find anywhere else. 

That’s why having a real POV matters. Your POV crystallizes what you believe about the world and your role in it, telling the audience not just what you offer, but more importantly, conveying how you’re going to make things better for them. Consider, for example, the difference in copy on two banners for a hypothetical fintech: 

1. AI that supercharges your financial workflows 
2. Not all AI is fluent in finance. Get a partner that is. 

One feels like a generic, expected description of services … because it is. The second is a statement of belief, a point of view on an industry at an inflection point, and an implication of the competitive moat that our clients at FactSet really have. 

While the first puts the onus on you to dig deeper to see what sets these folks apart, the second gives you everything you need to know in one confident tagline—and speaks directly to every buy-side professional who’s ever tried and failed to get high-quality work from off-the-shelf AI. (Relatedly, that’s also why our Fluent in Finance campaign not only shattered performance benchmarks—driving a 19-point favorability lift, 16-point familiarity lift, and 12-point consideration lift—but was also called out in FactSet’s Q2 earnings call as a strong driver of top-of-funnel growth.) 

Creating a connection is what good advertising does: It pulls the viewer into the world by proving who you are and what you believe, instead of just describing what you do. And that’s what you should strive for when you launch your brand. 

But great campaign launches go far beyond advertising. For them to really be effective, you need to give them depth and pay off the promises you make in every part of the brand experience. 

If your campaign sets a bold vision, for example, for what financial services should be, then every single brand touchpoint should reinforce it. Your customer service should be elite. Your site should be uniquely easy to navigate. Your product should deliver on the top-of-funnel promise—and then some. By doing that, you turn a brand launch campaign that captures attention into one that generates demand at the top of the funnel and converts it to revenue effectively at the bottom. And that, my friends, is exactly what we want. 

What is a brand launch campaign?

A brand launch campaign is your brand’s introduction—or reintroduction—to its audiences. Built around a single, ownable idea, it conveys who you are, what you believe, and what makes you different, setting the stage for the experience buyers will actually have with the brand once they engage with it. 

A product launch, in contrast, centers on what a company is specifically selling. A product launch can feel a lot like a brand launch, and also communicates a lot of the brand’s point of view. But the goal of it is to promote a particular product or service, not just a higher-level point of view on the world. 

What makes a brand launch campaign successful?

The best way to make a brand launch campaign successful is to use it as an opportunity to share a sharp, differentiating point of view that resonates with your target audience and speaks to something that matters to them.

What channels should be prioritized in a brand launch campaign?

We think of channel strategy the same way we think about creative: through an audience-first lens. We always start with research into where the audience shows up, how they consume media, and trends in their behavior. Then we evaluate the creative and core KPIs we’re targeting and build from there. 

For example, in B2B financial services, we know our audience tends to work in an office filled with television screens, and also consumes finance-focused media during the week. Because of that, we’d be more likely to recommend TV/online video in the buy than we might for a consumer brand whose base is more heavily on social, where an influencer strategy might be our top priority. 

How should messaging and creative evolve across launch phases?

Messaging and creative should generally not evolve across launch phases. But they might evolve as the campaign expands to encompass product and service offerings, or as it extends down the funnel. To make sure these extensions are effective, our campaign practice always pressure-tests ideas by exploring how they support product launches and manifest as mid- and lower-funnel assets. That way, we can ensure the campaign not only attracts attention at the top of the funnel, but that it also keeps momentum throughout it. 

How do you measure the performance of a brand launch campaign?

There are many ways to assess the performance of a brand launch campaign, ranging from traditional metrics, like awareness, familiarity, and favorability, to proprietary methods like VSA’s Promise to Performance^® research approach. No matter which method you choose, the key is 1) establishing a pre-launch baseline and 2) tracking against it to look for change. 

VSA’s Promise to Performance approach can help you establish a baseline for your brand and enable you to track changes in perception over time. Learn more about it. 

What is the biggest mistake when launching a new brand?

The three biggest mistakes companies make when launching a new brand are 1) not having a value proposition and point of view, 2) not aligning the business, and 3) not sticking with it long enough. 

Building a sticky, emotionally resonant brand means carving out a space you can own, which requires discipline and consistency, throughout every part of the organization. And it’s much bigger than a logo, viz ID, or clever marketing tagline: Your brand ethos should show up in every aspect of your customer journey and experience, as well as throughout your internal culture, and it should inform both product and policy development. 

It’s also important to stick with your creative post-launch. A lot of times, the run-up to launch is so long—with so many meetings, iterations, rounds of testing, and creative reviews—that internal teams start to tire of creative before it’s even had a chance to take hold with their audience. But it’s critical to give work enough time in the market to provide meaningful insights into how the messaging is resonating and where you can strengthen the next flight. 

To set yourself up for success, you should build alignment across cross-functional stakeholders long before you launch. The more stakeholders feel they’re involved and invested in the brand, the more likely they are to support and advocate for it. 

Closing takeaway

Launching a brand is the first step in a new relationship with your existing customers and the world. And it’s a singular opportunity to find and hone a POV that sets you apart. 

We can help you find the right one. Our services build enduring brands and brand launch campaigns that resonate at every stage of the funnel—from the first impression to the loyalty that follows. Want to learn more? Let’s talk.