Discovery Phase: You teach us, well, everything about Solvang. Then we work together to define our goals, and what success looks like.

Out of these working sessions, we’ll get a better sense of who you would like to target. This has important ramifications to both the creative and media plan.

Recently, we did a campaign statewide called The Switch Is On, designed to teach Californians about moving to clean energy appliances. More on this later, but the key point is, there’s a sister version of our campaign—Energy Upgrade California—produced by someone else, that spends $25MM a year, because it’s a big state, and they want to reach everyone.

$25 million. Who has that kind of money?

You don’t. We don’t. So if we can’t boil the ocean, we need to focus.

Strategy and Creative:

After talking, listening, going through your research, and perhaps conducting some of our own, we’ll develop a strategy or strategies, which we will present to the Solvang team, polishing it together until there is enthusiasm and consensus. (The Switch is On campaign has 100 clients, literally, so we are good at this). This strategy will inform both the creative and the media efforts.

While the Creatives go off to think about how to come up with something that is a) on strategy b) stop-you-in your-tracks-arresting, and c) distinctive, the media team will begin crafting a plan to reach your newly-defined target audience as efficiently as possible. No $25 million required.

Obvious (to us) but worth stating:

We know you don’t need help filling hotels on, say, Saturdays in June. We are well-versed in the importance of getting people to come midweek, as well as offpeak, what our old Tahoe client called Shoulder Season. We have all sorts of ideas on ways to help you with that.

Speculative work doesn’t work for anyone:

It’s hard to know exactly what we might do for Solvang—not without a firm understanding of your priorities, budget and target audience, target geography, and other key details. Anything we do now would be way off the mark—both in terms of the media plan, and the creative—and not to the quality you deserve. Instead, we’ve added comparable tourism and small-to-medium-sized campaigns, complete with metrics, below, so you can get a better idea of what a real Solvang campaign from us would look like.

About Media:

Media is just as critical to a campaign as great creative. One thing we know we wouldn’t do: dump everything into digital banners, the simple kind.

We get that banners are accountable. We get that clients love the tracking. But when was the last time YOU clicked on a banner? (Video banners are another story.)

Each media type serves a different purpose. The goal is to put together an integrated plan that reaches our key target with enough weight (impressions) to get people to move along the sales funnel.

Here’s an example of a media plan we created for Montage Health in Central California that drove outstanding levels of awareness for this new brand. According to our tracking study, we lifted a new healthcare brand to have about the same level of awareness as Kaiser + Thrive. Kaiser has spent a billion dollars. We did it for peanuts, in comparison.