What is Brand Response?

/// The Evolution of Brand Response

Brand Response Past

Media Culture has been innovating in the performance marketing arena for 29 years. The truth is, we have been a Brand Response agency the entire time – but Brand Response, and what it means, has shifted.

When we began, Brand Response looked like Direct Response TV commercials. Better known as infomercials, they were the commercials of decades past that encouraged you to buy one, get one free, but only if you called within the next 30 minutes. Love them or hate them, they were effective. We are proud to have worked with some big companies that thrived under this style.

In the 80s and 90s, Direct Response TV (also known as DRTV) was one of the only major options for direct to consumer companies who wanted to put their names and products out there and be seen. But we can all agree now that the culture has changed.

Or, if you will, the Media Culture has shifted.

Brand Response Is Media Culture

The current media landscape is robust, to say the least. Twenty-nine years ago, the term “omnichannel” would have been confined to outlets like television, radio, billboards, and magazines. But now, it’s much more diverse and, therefore, more important than ever for businesses to stand out in a crowd. That’s why we changed our name in 2021 to Media Culture, to properly reflect who we’ve always been: innovators within the media landscape, always adapting to evolving consumer behaviors.

We take both of the words in our name seriously: Media is at the heart of the services we offer, but culture? Well, culture is our compass. Our clients are more than clients – you are our partners. We commit to meeting business objectives by first becoming intimately familiar with your target audience, identifying impactful messaging that will motivate the audience to take an action, and selecting the most relevant channels and placements to present that messaging. In short, we are an extension of your team, dedicated to getting it right.

Let's look at precisely what Brand Response is and how Media Culture embodies this term to deliver for your brand.

/// Brand Response Is Strategy + Creative

A Brand Response campaign delivers short-term conversions while building awareness and preference for your brand. Powerful messaging brings your brand to life. It resonates with your customers, helping your organization earn trust and build long-term relationships.

But without a strategic foundation, even the most tactically sound campaign is unlikely to drive the desired results. Your creatives may reach your target audience but fail to capture their attention. Or your messaging may hit all the right notes but fail to reach the consumer at the right moment.

An effective Brand Response campaign addresses both strategy and creative. These critical components are vital to developing a plan that allocates equal importance to generating immediate response and long-term brand awareness.

Strategy

In the early days of Direct Response TV, advertisers had the benefit of being able to focus on product features and rely on a limited-time offer and 2-for-1 CTAs to do the heavy lifting of motivating the consumer to pick up the phone and place an order.

Today, in the era of unending media consumption, increased competition, and readily available opinions and reviews, a quick Google search could be enough to dissuade the average consumer from making an impulse purchase.

That’s where Brand Response comes in. The goal of Brand Response is not to drive a sale based on impulse, but to build a brand association and, when done properly, an emotional connection with the target consumer. Brand Response advertising relies less on impulse and more on inspiration, inspiration driven by the strategic combination of audience insights, creative messaging, and media placement.

A robust media strategy should be able to answer these basic questions:

Demographics /// Who is the target consumer?
Market /// What are the category and competitive insights?
Consumer Journey /// When in the consumer path to purchase is our target most receptive to messaging?
Media Consumption /// Where can the consumer be found?
Psychographics /// Why does our target audience behave in certain ways? What are the personal values and motivators?
Measurement /// How do we define success? What are the business KPIs?

Creative

In the direct response space, creative strategy has often been limited to ensuring best practices are used to drive the desired short-term response. Although an important component, any creative expected to generate a long-term emotional connection to a brand will have to rely on the target audience’s psychographics in order to properly speak to that audience.

For example, creative speaking to a consumer who values a life of excitement may feature themes related to adventure, whereas messaging speaking to a consumer driven by a need to acquire wealth and influence might speak to themes related to prestige and prosperity.

The customer persona is not the only factor to be considered when developing impactful creative. Where the consumer is in the purchase funnel (whether just now learning about the brand, deciding whether they need the brand’s offering, or determining which brand to purchase from) will also have implications on how the brand speaks to the consumer.

Think of your creatives as relationship-building blocks. Each piece is an outreached hand, inviting your target audience to join your brand and demonstrating what makes your company trustworthy.

In order to build trust, Brand Response creative must:

Identify what motivates your ideal prospects through the analysis of first and third-party data.
Consider where, when, and how your audience consumes content, then overlay it with details about their lifestyles, activities, and pain points.
Use audience insights to create inspirational and actionable messaging at the best times on the right platforms.

Strategy + Creative: The Power Couple

Innovation driven by a robust media strategy forms a strong foundation for brand awareness and demand-generation campaigns. And an investment in this powerful combination sets your campaign up to generate response today without sacrificing long-term growth.

But researching and understanding the granular details is challenging, as is turning the results into an actionable plan. You can overcome these barriers by partnering with performance marketing experts.

Our team collaborates with yours in order to learn everything there is to know about your audience and business goals. We combine your first-party information with research to gain a clear picture of your ideal customer.

Strategy and creative are the foundation of any Brand Response plan. Once we have these components, we use them to inform media planning and buying decisions.

/// Brand Response Is Media Planning + Buying

A brand response campaign generates action while developing a devoted user base. Indeed, the latest research from the Performance Marketing Association (PMA) found, “Each dollar of channel spending drove an average of $12 in e-commerce contribution.”

As a result, media planning and buying must take many factors into account. After all, your prospects are scattered across a multitude of channels, both linear and digital. They switch devices and platforms throughout the day, and behaviors can change almost overnight. At the same time, consumers expect consistent experiences across devices and platforms.

A customer-centric planning and buying strategy improves audience experiences. It reiterates brand messages and encourages prospects to act. Behind the scenes, a cohesive yet flexible approach lets you adjust tactics and platforms to connect with customers continually.

We collaborate with your team to plan and execute media strategies, allowing you to achieve the greatest return possible for your advertising budget.

Media Planning

Based on Kantar and Nielsen research, HubSpot reported that brand awareness requires “a multichannel, surround sound approach.” It’s more than just catching prospects on a single platform. Instead, reach them at different touch points during the day and use compelling CTAs to achieve results.

Brand Response is effective media planning. A Brand Response plan determines how, when, and where your audience sees your targeted messaging.

We work with your team to select a media mix that is not only unique to your audience’s consumption habits, but also maximizes conversions and engagement for your brand.

But we don’t stop there. Trends change quickly, and our research-driven approach ensures that we continuously account for evolving consumption habits. For instance, HubSpot said, “In 2022, 80% of brands use paid social media advertising, and Facebook and YouTube are the most popular places for companies to spend their advertising budget.” Insider Intelligence predicts, “Next year, search ad spending will maintain double-digit growth to reach $111.80 billion — twice what was spent on the format in 2019.”

These trends are significant. But you need to consider your specific audience and market, not take a cookie-cutter approach. We work with your team to determine if your advertising budget is better spent on different channels or platforms.

Media Buying

The advantage of Brand Response is that you don't have to choose between branding or direct response media buys. We use data to pick the channel, timing, and message, so we reach your target audience and restate your value.

First, we engage with the media provider to negotiate the price and placement of ads. This part of performance marketing is similar to acquiring inventory or real estate. It’s heavily reliant on industry knowledge and relationships.

The advantage of collaborating with Media Culture is that we have the relationships in place to secure optimal placement and timing. We also understand marketplace changes, whether from consumer behavior or in terms of a media vendor’s available reach.

Many factors go into media buying, including:

Determining the best channels and placements
Understanding cost differences across platforms
Knowing the expected reach for advertisers
Connecting the right content to the best channel
Scheduling ads to target consumers repeatedly across multiple channels

Through decades of media buying, we’ve learned the benefits and disadvantages of different ad units, placements, and timeframes. This knowledge and our deep understanding of your business enable us to negotiate and buy media across multiple venues. Our industry relationships and negotiation skills help us to find and secure advertising deals that deliver a solid return.

/// Brand Response Is Measurement

Our initial research and strategy process gives us a clear understanding of your ideal customer’s behavior and preferences throughout their journey. But the work doesn’t stop there.

We use insights and new data from active campaigns to analyze and optimize your Brand Response campaigns on an ongoing basis. In short, we apply the rigor of data-driven performance marketing to demand generation and branding activities. And doing so adds significant value to your organization.

According to McKinsey & Company, understanding the earlier stages of the consumer journey prior to conversion has several advantages. “Companies report marketing efficiency gains of up to 30% and incremental top-line growth of up to 10% without increasing the marketing budget. On average, the impact is significantly higher than that of established marketing ROI (MROI) methods for branding activities.”

Learn how our advanced measurement capabilities help us understand the full consumer journey, refine your campaigns, and maximize ROI.

Reporting + Data Visualization

Measuring success across multiple channels and campaigns takes time, effort, and expertise. Oftentimes, decision-makers end up with massive amounts of information that isn’t always easily digestible, making it hard to develop actionable insights. In other cases, data regarding media planning and buying is inaccessible. A templated report doesn’t provide the depth or transparency required to run and optimize performance marketing campaigns.

At Media Culture, we know data forms the foundation of your approach, and it continues to play a substantial role throughout your media planning and buying stages.

Your marketing and advertising efforts produce massive amounts of information about your prospects, media channels, and campaigns. This data is crucial to decision-making. However, it takes work to sort raw data and explain its meaning. To make data actionable, companies employ data scientists to parse the information and turn it into graphical representations.

By partnering with Media Culture, you get not only insights from the data, but the visualization tools (charts, graphs, maps, and more) to undertake your own analysis. These make your data accessible and understandable, allowing faster decisions and deeper insights.

Data visualization surfaces patterns, trends, and outliers. Graphics put the essential details on the screen so your teams can absorb and remember information. Use visualization tools to understand how prospects interact with advertisements across touchpoints over time and identify optimization opportunities.

Multitouch Attribution (MTA)

Traditional reporting models restrict your ability to understand your customer’s entire journey. These approaches only take into account attribution at a channel or tactic level, but don’t take into consideration the contribution of each channel/tactic on overall performance. In addition, they often fail to detail how behavior and perceptions affect performance marketing outcomes.

Fortunately, we can optimize your campaigns using our multitouch attribution models. Our customizable solution provides a bottom-up analysis and visibility into your customers’ activities. You can take the guesswork out of your marketing investment by tracking and analyzing engagement across every touch point, so you always know how multiple media channels work together to drive conversion.

Marketing Mix Model (MMM)

Regardless of how robust they may be, MTA models are meant to measure immediate, short-term response. Use a marketing mix model when you need a macro-level, top-down view of your marketing and advertising across multiple channels, over a longer period of time. Statistical analysis helps you measure the impact on your marketing share or sales over time.

Moreover, an ongoing collection and analysis process keeps your activities and results aligned with your business goals. This ensures your marketing program provides value to your company, delivering short and long-term benefits.

We gather information continually and look at internal marketing variables (e.g. marketing spend and channel mix) as well as larger external macro factors (e.g., economic performance) in order to understand the performance of the full media mix. Doing so helps us evaluate the effectiveness of each variable, and we can adjust your measurement strategy as needed. A successful model guides future Brand Response and media buying activities. It also helps you forecast marketing outcomes based on historical data.

/// Brand Response Is Media Culture

Media Culture — formerly known as Koeppel Direct — has been an influential leader in the performance marketing industry since our founding in 1995. We stay at the forefront of technology and media consumption and evolve our capabilities to meet the moment.

Our advanced capabilities and track record of success extend across platforms, allowing us to tailor agile Brand Response strategies to satisfy the needs of each of our clients. But more importantly, we prioritize understanding every aspect of your business—acknowledging your past, partnering with you in the present, and working with you to invest in your future.

From insightful strategy to flawless campaign execution, to ongoing data collection, we work by your side to accelerate your marketing. But we don’t expect you to simply wait for results or trust in the process. Instead, we earn your confidence through transparency and consistency.

Data informs every interaction, and you can expect honest conversations with the most talented minds in media strategy, planning and buying, and measurement. Together, we will produce Brand Response media campaigns designed to tell your story, achieve your goals, and scale your brand.

Media Culture is Brand Response. And your company is our future. We bring our expertise and capabilities to the table, helping your business break through the noise and increase engagement to produce results.

Table of Contents

History of Brand Response

Strategy + Creative

Media Planning + Buying

Reporting + Data