What Is A Campaign?

While a brand is permanent, campaigns are short-term advertising and messaging programs that are meant to appeal to specific audiences at specific times. Campaigns communicate something important about a brand to a particular audience for a particular purpose.

Sometimes people confuse campaigns with brands, and while they’re related, they aren’t the same thing. For example, people sometimes mistakenly think of Nike’s brand as “Just Do It,” even though that was a (long-running and very successful) campaign. The Nike brand is ultimately about victory, and the “Just Do It” campaign was meant to express that message for the brand.

Campaigns come in all shapes and sizes, but most great campaigns have:

  • A clear message – Campaigns try to persuade an audience to embrace a specific idea or set of ideas, often expressed as a tagline or key phrase but sometimes conveyed as more of a subtle undertone.
  • A distinctive style – Campaigns usually have some distinctive stylistic element — like a font treatment, a design approach, even a sound or jingle in radio and television ads — that tie the different pieces of a campaign together.
  • A timetable – Campaigns aren’t meant to live forever. Once the immediate purpose has been served, old campaigns often sunset and new campaigns arise for different purposes.

Campaigns at NOVA

At NOVA, campaigns are conceived and launched by the central marketing team for specific advertising purposes. We will typically have one major brand campaign active at a particular time; we may occasionally introduce minor campaigns for specific purposes alongside major campaigns and have them in-market simultaneously. But it’s critical that every campaign is rooted in our brand essence — boldness — and that every campaign reinforces our brand pillars in terms that resonate with the campaign’s intended audience(s).