Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Campaign is not for the Wild Hearted

An amazing fact came to the fore while watching a documentary on National Geographic on the hunting and defensive skills of the wild animals. The key aspect of survival was not strength or size or venom ... it was patience. In one of the episodes, a group of three lioness laid seige on a watering hole for over 3 hours before the first zebra showed up. And even then, due to the impatience of one young lioness, they lost the hunt. If only the young lioness had waited a few more minutes they could have got the zebra trapped in the vicious triangle they had created. In this case the strength of the lions were not useful in achieving the success. Another episode showed a fish lying still under sand till its prey came close enough. Time to kill ... over two hours.

This was an amusing fact. The law of the wild rewards the one with most patience. But then nature has one resource which is unlimited ... TIME. Alas, we who live in the concrete jungle do not have access to unlimited stocks of time. There is always someone practicing to run faster, jump higher, become stronger.

Analytics was bought in to make organizations more nimble by using foresight or predictive insights. Knowing what is likely to happen in future gave businesses more time to adjust their business plans and approaches. But as more and more organizations are adopting analytics, the law of faster, higher and stronger is taking over. Already, the analytics vendors have started talking of automation and analytics factories. In-memory analytics is another subject area gaining popularity. These approaches are aimed at operationalizing anaytics much faster.

In light of this scenario, one cannot have a 3 month project plan for any analytical exercise. The secret mantra is to Fail Fast. This is epecially true in the marketing field. The campaign managers still make project plans that run into weeks for each campaigns. When the campaign is launched, a lot of time and effort and money has gone into the preparation. In order to justify this investment, the campaign managers then try to keep the campaign over the red line. This may involve additional efforts, more money or more precise analysis.

The catch is that while the campaign was in a planning phase, the world around the business was constantly moving. Things change very rapidly in the consumer business. So when the campaigns eventually get launched, it was a different world then the one that was referenced during the planning and analysis phase.

I was surprised when discussing with an ex team member who is currently implementing a "multi channel campaign management" product (I will refrain from naming the product now). He had run into some issues and had called up to check on some configuration. He told me he was too busy since this was a "go live" weekend for a campaign. I found out that this campaign was being planned for over a month. The customer had a one week UAT (user acceptance test). I was shocked and amused to know this. I am very confident that this customer had no idea of BTL campaigns. The best UAT is out on the field. He should have done a quick test campaign to maybe 100 or 500 or 2% of the customer base and checked out the result. This should have been done as quick as possible. Depending on the industry, even within a couple of hours. If it worked, he could have gone across the customer base. If not, then look for something else. There is a nice scenario that a colleague shared with me. He said a typical day in the life of the campaign manager should be "A new idea by 0800 hrs, a new campaign by 1000 hrs, a test campaign by 1200 hrs, evaluate results by 1400 hrs, reject or deploy campaign by 1600 hrs, track the campaign by 1800 hrs".

But everytime I present this case, the idea does not find acceptance. Maybe it creates stress on the campaign manager. Cause now he has to get up with atleast 10 new ideas that he will test during the day alongwith the campaigns of days past. Most probably 9 out of the 10 will get rejected in the test phase. 1 campaign gets rolled out along with other campaigns. The start of the next day needs another 10 ideas. Compare this scenario with the one where he takes a month to plan and launch one campaign and his rejection is understandable.

I have seen marketing departments with 7 or 10 campaign managers running maybe 5 times the number of campaigns. Some of these campaigns have been in force for over 3 or 6 months. On the other side, I have met companies that claim to run over 1000 campaigns daily. I seriously doubt how they calculcate the contribution from these campaigns. The world outside has changed a lot over the past 3 months, so how can a campaign perform uniformly over the same period. Let alone 1000s of campaigns. 

Somewhere, somehow complacency has set in the process. This is where a nimbler competition can overrun the business. Get your campaign department to run more finer and more multiple campaigns with shorter turnaround. If possible, with a turnaround of a few hours. That is a sure shot recipe to beat your competition. For a man of patience belongs to the wild world and not the business world.

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