I was lucky enough to make it on a train with air conditioning, so I'm currently appreciating the cool breeze.
Train: Q Train, Commute: Evening commute home, Current Song: 8Teen by Khalid
Today I've been thinking a lot about success. Not personal success as much as brand success and the importance of setting goals. When working in Advertising as an Assistant Media Planner, I first understood the importance of goals.
Setting goals means your team knows what they are working towards. It gives the work you are doing purpose. It's the only way you can measure success. Without goals you cannot measure how your preforming, because you don't know what your meant to measure. Sure you got 10,000 views on your video, but do you know why? What were you trying to accomplish? Brand recognition? Were you showing off a new product? If so did you have it drive to a product page? And if you did, please tell me you had it tagged correctly - so you can understand if that video actually drove people to purchase. Without goals you will miss out on valuable data and insights that could uncover a problem with what your doing or even validate all your hard work.
While goals are so important I've found that on many of the projects I've worked on there isn't any clear defined goals. Why? I don't have a good answer. I believe it has to do with a variety of things.
1. I've worked on a lot of smaller projects where brands are just starting out and figuring out what it is they are exactly trying to accomplish. The thing is - those brands should still have a goal. May it be a goal for their first campaign or overall brand.
2. The person in charge has forgotten or doesn’t know that goals are important. They are clouded by other things and have lost sight of what they are actually hoping to accomplish.
3. The brand has never had a proper goal, so no one working on the brand has seen the value of testing, analyzing, and optimizing.
4. Someone in charge manages to convince everyone below them that the brand has goals, but there really isn't any.