Media activation

When marketers “push the button” to set multichannel customer engagement campaigns in motion, they are executing a crucial phase of a multi-step process known as media activation.

What is media activation?

Media activation refers to the process of harnessing carefully selected media to engage carefully selected audiences. It’s the execution of campaigns and experiences across online, offline and virtual channels to promote a brand, product, or message. It’s the creation and deployment of the right content for the right recipients via the right media.

Activation is how organizations maximize the impact of an ever-expanding media ecosystem to reach and influence audiences directly – wherever they are, whatever their interests and preferences. Its primary goals are to build awareness of, and connection with the brand, propelling recipients along the path to purchase.

However, media activation is distinct from activation advertising, which seeks to generate an immediate customer response to engagement activities (from survey completions to product purchases).

Successful media activation creates a coherent, distinctive and data-informed marketing campaign across multiple channels, tailored to a brand’s audience preferences, and designed to deliver against strategic goals.

Key phases of the media activation

While the core focus of media activation is the media execution itself, this phase sits in the middle of a wider set of processes with major phases including:

• Planning and strategy: Defining the campaign objectives, target audience, media planning and mix, and the success measures or metrics by which its success will be judged.
• Media execution: Coordinating the cross-channel campaign execution, creative deployment, managing third-party media relationships (such as DSPs or influencer partnerships), and delivering experiential marketing engagements.
• Performance monitoring and measurement: Analyzing and quantifying campaign engagement against success metrics to generate actionable insights while the campaign is still active.
• Campaign enhancement: Updating and optimizing campaign execution, from media mix to content deployed, based on response insight derived from the monitoring phase.
• Reporting: Summarizing campaign performance and media activation success against defined objectives.

Successful media activation builds momentum and customer engagement over time, as increasing audience understanding feeds through to more tailored approaches and improved return on ad spend (ROAS).

Media activation vs digital activation

So what is digital activation? It’s similar to, but still different from media activation. Its scope is narrower. Media activation embraces the full omnichannel domain including traditional offline and experiential marketing channels (such as in-store activation, print media or events).

As the name suggests, digital activation focuses on digital marketing and digital media. It uses digital technologies, such as social media, websites, apps, and email, to engage audiences and drive specific online actions. In short, digital activation is an important component of media activation.

Why is media activation important?

Media activation is crucial because it’s the lightning rod that brings ad campaigns and marketing strategies to life. It’s the conduit through which brands connect with their target audience, building brand awareness and creating audience experiences that resonate – and translate to tangible commercial results.

Without effective media activation the marketing effort required to build the right audience and craft the right messaging is wasted. But when deployed across a range of carefully selected media touchpoints, campaign impact, customer engagement, and return on ad spend can all be amplified. And when would-be customers are in pre-purchase research mode, well-structured media activation can ensure brand presence in the most influential channels.

Each node in this media network also delivers a degree of audience intelligence through monitoring of performance metrics. Actionable insights including the resonance of different creative treatments, on-site behaviors and conversion data can be used to improve the effectiveness of ongoing campaigns.

Types of media activation

As the media ecosystem expands, offering brands new routes to connect with and engage customers, the range of media activations in the marketing toolbox continues to grow – free and paid, online and offline, programmatic advertising and self-served.

Some of the most familiar types of media activation include:

• Broadcast media advertising (linear TV and radio)
• Connected TV (CTV) advertising
• Content marketing
• Experiential and event marketing
• Email marketing
• Display advertising
• Out-of-home (OOH) and digital-out-of home (DOOH) activations
• Partnerships with influencers
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine marketing (SEM)
• Print media
• Programmatic remarketing campaigns
• Social media activation
• Sponsorships and brand collaborations
• Video content or audio advertising (platforms such as Spotify, TikTok, or YouTube)

Different customer segments and demographics engage with media differently. People’s media consumption habits change and evolve, right alongside their buyer behaviors. o build stronger customer bonds and brand awareness, to demonstrate relevance and empathy, and to optimize purchase potential, brands need the capacity for omni-channel media activation.

Developing an effective media activation strategy

There’s no cookie-cutter approach to building an effective media activation strategy. Each business has its own unique commercial DNA, priorities and preferences, audiences and aspirations. Consequently, each media strategy will reflect these individual traits. However, any successful gameplan is likely to include the following considerations.

Define your objectives

What you want your media campaign to achieve should be your North Star at all times. Not simply the individual success metrics such as click-through rates, brand awareness or conversions from individual engagements, but how the holistic campaign will impact overall business goals.

Understand your audiences

A clear understanding of existing, prospect, and target audiences is the cornerstone of successful media activation. All customer retention and acquisition strategies and all media planning and media buying activities rely on a defined appreciation of who you’re trying to engage. The who and how defines the where and why. This requires high-quality, detailed audience data and the expertise to analyze, segment, and prioritize audience groups. The more information about your audience you can gather – from demographics and interests to buyer behaviors and media preferences – the more personalized your engagement and the greater your return on investment.

Outsource, in-house, or hybrid?

Decide whether you have the time, expertise, experience, and technology required to activate omnichannel media campaigns in-house or whether you need to work with a third-party agency for at least some aspects of your campaigns. Outsourcing can be a good option for businesses without dedicated media teams adept at activation across the multiple digital channels and each ad serving platform.

Specialist partners bring instant know-how when it comes to managing, measuring, and optimizing campaigns – which can be a complex process when media activation involves programmatic deployment. Similarly, they may be able to advise on viable media choices, historically successful platforms, and potential influencer partnerships.

Media selection

A clear understanding of strategic goals and target audiences provides the parameters for selecting the right media options. Dig into your own customer data to determine the titles, platforms and methodologies that have proven successful engagement channels. Then work with media providers (and your agency if applicable) to tailor your media mix to your target audiences.

Budgeting

Naturally you will seek to allocate financial resources across different media channels to maximize reach and impact. But where you can, allow a little flexibility into the budgeting and media activation processes so you can reallocate spend to channels that overperform mid-campaign (and away from those that fail to move the needle).

Campaign consistency and integration

All media touchpoints in a campaign need to reinforce and amplify each other. For this, media activation professionals need to ensure content is deployed consistently across all engagement channels. This is how you establish presence in your target marketplaces, creating messages that stick in the minds of your audience.

Track, analyze, adjust, optimize

Pressing go on a campaign is like the starting pistol at the beginning of a race – not the finish line tape. Media activation is not a one-and-done, set-it-and-forget-it process. After your campaign launches you need to be all over its performance data across every channel. Digital channels in particular can often provide near real-time response data. These valuable insights allow you to adjust campaign components, from media mix to creative content, helping optimize overall campaign performance.

Post-campaign reporting and analysis

Every campaign and media activation should provide intelligence for future marketing activity. It’s vital to evaluate the overall performance and that of individual campaign components against the success metrics established prior to launch. Any learning points can be used to shape new campaigns, enhancing their likely ROAS.

See also: Scott’s Miracle-Gro Achieves 11x Campaign Lift Using Acxiom Audience Modeling

How Acxiom can help

Acxiom can help brands at every stage of their media activation journey – from audience data preparation to campaign measurement and reporting. For more than 55 years we have been at the forefront of customer data management and customer identity, making marketing and advertising solutions work for our clients.

Here is a small selection of the ways in which Acxiom can amplify the effectiveness of your media activation initiatives.

• Maximize the impact of your media spend by optimizing your customer data health. Our data management services and proprietary identity resolution solutions (such as our award-winning Real Identity™) help ensure your customer information is accurate, complete, and matched to the correct people. This is the essential data foundation on which all campaigns depend.
• Enrich your customer insights with high-quality third-party data, enabling tighter personalization and accurate audience segmentation.
• Reach new, high commercial potential audiences via ethical data collaborations with carefully selected partners.
• To help improve advertising conversion rates (maximizing ROAS), deploy Acxiom’s intelligent segmentation and AI to create personalized marketing calls-to-action.
• Personalize your content according to shopper and media data with our dynamic creative optimization (DCO), using AI algorithms to select and deliver individualized advertising variants.
• Measure the incremental effectiveness of your addressable media spend with our multi-touch attribution modeling, maximizing ROI and optimizing future campaigns.
• Leverage Acxiom’s advanced media analytics solutions that bring together online and offline data sources to power effective closed-loop marketing, improved media programs and better ROAS.

This is just an indicative sample of the many services Acxiom can offer to optimize your media activation.