Performance Versus Brand Marketing: Creative Is Always Key

Luke Regan is here to challenge perceptions of performance marketing as brand marketing’s less creative sibling. As managing partner at digital performance marketing agency, DAC UK, he’s unlocked the fun side of data – he’s even driven search engine optimisation (SEO) for Center Parcs by building an interactive game.

Fresh from recent wins for Best Lead Generation Campaign for David Lloyd Clubs and Best Team at the Performance Marketing Awards, Luke spoke to LBB to light up data’s dark depths. Sharing examples from his 19 years of professional experience, he reveals why the most pinpointed targeting is useless without compelling creative, why you should always feel empowered to challenge a mathematician, how to build a motivated team, and why a ‘brand to local’ mindset is the key ingredient in DAC’s recipe for success.

LBB> Many in our industry (and particularly in our creatively-focused readership) look down on performance marketing as less creative than brand marketing and maybe less glamorous. What's your favourite way to challenge that feeling?

Luke> With all marketing, you're going to have exponentially better results if you include creativity. The best, most pinpointed targeting in the world is useless if you don't have a compelling piece of creative. That doesn't have to be a gorilla banging a drum, but it needs to be in some way compelling to the user, whether it’s the relevance, the timeliness, the storytelling, or the way it evokes the brand, and whether that's a brand or performance message.

These days, across all the devices that we’re constantly scrolling, we get bombarded with imagery, with creative, with ads; so to actually have a chance of brand or performance message recall, it’s got to have something compelling about it, whether it's visually, the copy, the video, the message. I think the idea that you can do performance marketing without creative is nonsense really. 

You've got to be even more dialled up with storytelling with brand marketing, but again, with performance, you can't just rely on promos or lead generation messages alone. There's got to be a bit more. Why? Why now? Why this brand? That all comes back to creative. ‘Show, don't tell’ applies in performance marketing as much as it does in brand marketing. So I don't see creativity ending at brand; it's as important in performance as well. 

As an example of that, we've done things like build games and a dictionary of teenage slang to drive SEO results, because we knew they would be very shareable and drive traffic from the target demographic. It was creative within a performance environment where the ultimate goal was very performance-driven in terms of traffic, high quality links, PR. If you don't have creativity in your organisation and you're trying to drive performance, I think you're missing a big trick.

LBB> How can performance marketing be made more effective through creativity? 

Luke> From our perspective, even when we do performance marketing, we're in a competitive environment so we need to be thinking, ‘why this client versus another brand?’ So, what are their differentiators, USPs, strengths from a product perspective, versus their competition? How do we elevate them in a ‘show, don't tell’ way within the assets that we have? Some of the assets might be quite small, some of them might be copy only, but we still need to be utilising creativity to actually get that message to stand out. 

Even in SEO for clients such as David Lloyd, their big thing is ‘more than a gym’. We actually coined that with them when we were targeting SEO to use the word gym while saying they’re much more than that –-- they’re a full family, sporting, wellness experience. We use that in things like page titles, so that we can use ‘gym’, which is the SEO term they need to be appearing for, but say more than that from a brand perspective. Those are the ways we try to be as creative as possible. You're always having to think creatively about promoting a brand regardless of what your goals are. 

LBB> What's the most exciting use of data you've been involved in?

Luke> I think probably a project we did for Center Parcs, which was the game that I mentioned. It was an SEO brief within their brand campaign at the time. The data that we were looking at was the amount of distractions on family time, and how, in this day and age, you've got so many different demands on your time, often linked to devices. I've got kids, and there are emails from the school and WhatsApp groups for every class, then you’ve got emails from work and all the things you might have ordered, and then you've got social feeds. It's an absolute avalanche of information, often with a requirement for you to do something within a certain length of time. 

In partnership with [Center Parcs’] PR agency, there was a survey done to understand how people feel about this. What effect does it have on their time? Do they feel it takes away from quality family time? It came by that everybody felt the same, that they were bombarded with information. The way we used that data from an SEO perspective was we built a game where people basically had to remember a sequence of colours and input them while simulated notifications popped up on the screen. So it might be ‘your Sainsbury's order is booked in for 6pm today’, or ‘the school called and your child forgot their PE kit’, or,’a picture of you has been tagged’. The notifications would increase to increase the difficulty and see how your memory was affected.

For us, that was a point where we took a performance brief to drive shares of this game and traffic to the landing page; but there was also a data insight within that about distraction from family time, and a message that if we reduce these distractions, we’re cognitively more in the moment and happier. It was great for us, because it performed well from a performance perspective, but it was also linking to the client's brand message at the time which was about family time and fewer distractions, and the answer for that – a nice family break. It’s implicit, again, it's the ‘show, don't tell.’ 

LBB> You won an award for your team. What's the key to building that set of people and skill sets?

Luke> The most important thing is the cohesion of the team and the culture. We try to make  time for them to build bonds and get to know each other. The typical British way is going to the pub, but we're conscious that it doesn't always have to be around alcohol. For example, we'll try to build activities into our summer party – we've done scavenger hunts, sports, and competitive team games. You're far more likely to run through brick walls for each other if you've built a bond that is beyond just a colleague who you share a workload with.

That's why we insist now that everybody does a minimum of two days a week in the office. It’s about that team cohesion and those bonds, rather than supervision, getting people to interact and get to know each other. If you're 100% remote, it's probably twice as hard than when you have that physical proximity.

The second thing is recognition. Every time we get good feedback from a client, that's shared widely, and we name the people who are working on it. We make sure that at least weekly there's some level of recognition for somebody in the team, and often multiple people in the team. It's really important for people to know that they're valued.

The other thing is, do we give them opportunities to work on interesting stuff? For example, we might have a new supplier come in to pitch their new platform, or we might have interesting ways to use data for a client, whether that's an existing client or a new client. In the past, we’ve also done little competitive pitches where they'll pitch for the clients they don't work on but are ours so you get a fresh perspective from the team. It's a bit of fun and gives people a chance to think about stuff beyond their day to day. 

It's a combination of all of that, and obviously, good line management. And we tend to see good levels of retention, having people who've been with us 10 years.

LBB> What do ‘non-data people’ in advertising most need to understand about the use of data?

Luke> I’ve found sometimes people are wary of challenging people who bring in the data because they might not be as well-versed in it. It’s been years since I studied statistics or anything like that, but I know marketing, and I can challenge those numbers and ask, what's the methodology? What's the source of that data? How confident are we? Is it correlative or causative? You don't need to know the maths inside out to ask these questions.

If you're not happy with the first response, don't let it go. Dig further, because often, if you unpeel the layers, you'll get to the reality of it. Sometimes it's just that you want to know if there's a little bit of a health warning with something, because it might be presented very confidently, but I'd sooner know the reality – ‘this sample size wasn't huge,’ or ‘we don't know this,’ or ‘this is just correlation, we need to test if it's causative.’ Sometimes you need to stick to your guns until you get the person to say, ‘this isn't 100%, there are challenges with the data,’ but often if there's a confident enough mathematician, they give one answer and that's the end of the discussion. Keep digging to get to the nuggets and understand what the methodology is and where the data has come from. 

There's very little space for nuance. On LinkedIn, for example, there's stuff posted all the time. ‘We've done this study and only 5% of marketing is effective’, or ‘you've got to include this in your mix or you're going to lose out on 40%’. There's very little smallprint that comes through to say, ‘oh, bear in mind, this data is 15 years old and was only FMCG brands, and this is only correlative, we don't know if it's causative, so run your own experiments.’ There's very little ‘do your own research’, which wouldn’t pass in other fields. But we tend to just let it slide in marketing, for some reason.

LBB> What is the dream brief for you?

Luke> It would be in our sweet spot, so brand to local. We're looking to completely retool our entire marketing ecosystem and approach from top to bottom with a brand to local mindset – understanding that brand is critical, but also local. 

Our physical estate, for example, is a critical component of that. We want to join everything together from a data perspective, from a creative perspective, from a deployment perspective, from a tactics and channels perspective, and we want your help to knit that all together, because that is what we do for clients. We’re end-to-end in brand to local, and we can help them with whichever part of that ecosystem is not where they want it to be. And if none of it is, then we can do everything for them.