Out with the old, in with the old: how to reuse campaign assets effectively

Lucky Saint’s marketing and e-commerce director Kerttu Inkeroinen tells how she was “daunted” by the decision to repeat the campaign, worried customers would think it “old news.” In reality, while hard to admit, she says consumers aren’t thinking about the brand as much as she does or remembering its campaigns as well as the industry does.

For Lucky Saint, as a six-year-old brand in an emerging category, awareness is the most important marketing priority, and for Inkeroinen, “consistency is the best way to build brand recognition.” Some of the most successful brands in the world are built on it, she says, “from Coca-Cola rerunning its iconic Christmas truck ad year after year to Compare the Market’s meerkat living on with different reincarnations.“ The marketing director adds that ”brand legends are created by reminding people time and time again of your hero assets.”

Inkeroinen explains that she asked five questions before rerunning Lucky Saint’s campaign. These were:

1. “Is the consumer insight still relevant and assets effective in conveying our message? Has the landscape changed around us, or is the marketing task and context still the same?”

2. “Have we reached saturation and wear-out point with our existing creative? Spoiler alert – based on multiple marketing studies, the answer is most probably not.”

3. “Is our budget better spent on creating new assets or in increasing reach for our campaign? We decided it was the latter.”

4. “Do the assets need to be updated or refreshed in any way? We’ve added new copy lines into our campaign this year to bring a fresh element to the campaign while maintaining the core assets the same.”

5. “Can you build on what you’ve learned from your previous campaign and make it even more effective? We’ve added new media formats into our campaign this year, as well as added an on-trade specific campaign element to support pubs during the traditionally quiet time of Dry January for them.”

Chris Jefford, who is chief executive offer and co-founder at Truant, worked on a Pepsi Max campaign that ran for consecutive years. The ad was developed as a reaction to the first Christmas in Covid, where the core campaign message was adapted to respond to lockdown.

Jefford believes that “aside from the obvious budgetary advantages, rerunning campaigns can be a perfectly reasonable strategy.” But, he warns, there are a few things to watch out for: “Make sure the story is still relevant. If the world has moved on and the insight isn’t as compelling as it was, then maybe it’s time to think again, or at the least work a new story into the narrative.”

If the key campaign asset is the same, Jefford says to update the story that goes around it. “So, if it’s a TV asset, look at ways of refreshing the OOH messaging or creating a different content ecosystem around it.” Crucially, brands should be wary of rerunning an ad that has “been played to death” – it’s unlikely such an ad will ever gain the attention of audiences in the same way.

Good for the budget and the planet

Agency network MSQ has a unit, MSQ Source, that advises the network on sustainable and efficient campaign production. The department’s global lead, Darren Khan, says that reusing campaigns is not only a major cost efficiency but also has a sustainable benefit. He asks: “How many times do people go off to shoot when they’ve already got material?”

His advice to marketers is to get assets better organized and use an asset creation platform. “Otherwise, it becomes quite clunky and not cost-effective because you’re using lots of editors.”

In the brief stage, marketers should be thinking first about what they already have and whether it makes sense to reuse it before they go about working up new ideas.

“If you set it all up correctly, if you think about your shoot then organize it better, and if you then you have the right technology to adapt it faster and at scale, you can sweat the assets for the foreseeable future,” he says.