Thirteen years ago, when I first entered the industry, I was introduced to some of the basic concepts around how an advertising and communications campaign should be structured: an insight had to be profound, a campaign usually had to have three phases, and all activities had to be connected in a 360° ecosystem — for example, after seeing A, consumers would have to do B in order to get C.
So everyone focused on dressing up the proposal with beautiful activities and making the whole thing as “storytelling” as possible.
Then execution happened, and Threads City got yet another post about how “agency life in Vietnam is so tough” 🙂
Back then, I simply absorbed these things and never asked why, because everyone seemed to be doing the same thing. Later, I realized that nobody had really asked why either. Most people had simply heard these rules from someone else and passed them along (perhaps they originated from some theory somewhere). So today, I’d like to take on a slightly systematic mission: pointing out a few things that may look beautiful on a proposal, but rarely work as beautifully in real life.
Some of these truths may be uncomfortable for agencies, clients, and even BODs who have never had to look too closely at these details and usually only see the final report.
A Campaign Must Have 3 Phases
The default mode when drawing a campaign framework is usually three phases — sometimes more: Tease, Launch, Amplify; or Trigger, Reveal, Engage, Share; or some variation of the same thing. But do you really believe an average consumer can go through all three or more phases of a campaign in order to “hear” the brand’s complete story?
No matter how precise your media targeting is, if 100 people see the Tease phase, perhaps only 10 of those same people plus 20 new people will see the Launch phase, and by the Amplify phase, maybe only three of the original audience plus another 30 newcomers will see it. For those who have followed from the beginning, fine. But what about everyone who jumps straight into the later phases of the campaign? How are they supposed to understand the story the brand is trying to tell?
It sounds like a simple question, but whenever I ask my students, they usually hesitate before answering, because they’ve fallen into the same “auto-pilot mode” I used to be in: simply assuming that this is how campaigns are supposed to work.
Except for certain categories where the product itself can naturally generate anticipation and excitement — electronics, smartphones, automobiles, real estate, movies, music, etc. — campaigns with more than two phases are often less effective. That’s why I personally stopped recommending three-phase campaigns a long time ago.
Engagement Activities
Alongside activities or assets designed to build awareness, almost every plan seems to include an engagement activity — asking people to take some kind of action, mostly online (as opposed to an offline activation). Common examples include playing a mini game, joining a hashtag challenge, creating their own content such as sharing a personal story (UGC), or talking to a chatbot to receive some kind of personalized content.
At first glance, it makes perfect sense: once customers are aware of us, surely they’ll be interested enough to engage with us. The problem is that we tend to massively overestimate how hardworking consumers are.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: if you launch a TikTok dance challenge, chances are you’ll eventually have to book content creators and seeders just to generate enough participation numbers for the brand team to put into the report, so the brand team, in turn, has numbers to report to the BOD. Seriously, how many normal people are willing to get off the couch, dance because a brand asked them to, and upload it to TikTok?
The same thing happens with prize-based mini games. Even when the prize is only worth a few hundred thousand VND, the post goes live and suddenly there are 1,000 participants. Wow, amazing — time to give out the prizes and write the report. Those of us who are naturally suspicious of everything will probably check those thousand participants before announcing the winners, and surprise-not-surprise, around 900 of them may turn out to be clone accounts managed by nine actual people, known as “prize hunters” for anyone unfamiliar with the term. This loophole has probably existed for around 15 years now, and what surprises me is that brands know about it — and still keep doing the same thing.
If you’re interested, you can look up The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities by Nielsen Norman Group, published in… 2006. Yes, twenty years ago.
That doesn’t mean every engagement activity fails. From what I’ve observed, there have been a handful of very successful engagement activities in Vietnam: when Vinamilk rebranded, people changed their profile pictures into the “Bảo Khánh — since 19xx” style; one Tet, MoMo let people generate AI images to cheekily ask others for lì xì; Ensure once created a TikTok filter showing an elderly version of yourself; and last year, we saw the trend of using AI to create Ghibli-style images and snowy portraits with ChatGPT/Gemini.
These successful engagement activities share three things in common: they build on a familiar behavior that requires little or no instruction, provide a clear emotional payoff, are minimally branded or not branded at all, and offer NO material reward. That’s why I personally recommend engagement activities very rarely. If engagement is a mandatory requirement and has to become the hero activity of the campaign, then for me, it needs to meet those three criteria.
This is, of course, my personal point of view — and one I’ve been applying in my own work for quite a long time. Different opinions and respectful debate are always welcome. I also share real situations I’ve personally experienced throughout my Strategic & IMC Planning course, so that Planners can learn to make their own decisions about what is actually worth doing, instead of adding activities simply for the sake of making the plan look “complete.”
If this article made you stop and think, please help me share it so a few more people can think about it too. And I hope you have a holiday where no job suddenly comes chasing after you ;)
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