Shape and Rhythm
Featured on LinkedIn — January 25, 2024
There seems to be a sneaky-high concentration of musicians at the top of the advertising world. They’re always drummers too. My conspiracy theory? I think it’s because campaigns today require weaving together so many disparate parts that people who can make sense of patterns tend to do well here.
Unfortunately, I’m useless in a band.
But thankfully, I see campaign patterns like a drummer might. Rather than disconnected parts – each ad in isolation – I’m looking at the overall composition as a system of assets, channels, and context. It’s a perspective that lets me tweak the pattern in a way that gets us more. More attention, more people leaning in, more campaign longevity, more memories formed.
There are two concepts that I think help diagnose structure and give you your first levers on how to tweak it. I think of them as a campaign’s SHAPE and RHYTHM.
For more background, this comes from the Sequencing & Integration section of the Connections Guide – an approach to help brands create campaigns that earn more attention than they could simply buy.
The concepts of Shape and Rhythm in a campaign are apparent at two levels: the advertiser’s view, and the audience’s view. I’ll dive deeper into the audience effect first, then come back to how this is shaped at the advertiser’s level.
From the audience’s view, Shape and Rhythm are simple (assuming you pay any attention or remember any ads – a very dangerous assumption).
Shape is quite simply “Have I seen this more than once?” immediately followed by “Is it the same or different in each place I saw it?” Once you see a second part of the campaign, a pattern starts emerging: How are the two parts related? Is it simply the same exact ad, again and again and again? Was it something other than an ad – did the brand put on an event? Did I come across it through another mechanism – did a friend DM it my way? Most humans will simply pick up on this pattern by feeling either confused (uh-oh) or intrigued (jackpot). You, smart strategist, may start to recognize whether that pattern feels connected or spread out, thin or deep, pushed or pulled.
That also starts to bleed into Rhythm: Am I seeing this all within a short period, or have there been longer gaps between when I found this idea?
Not just metaphysical musing, Shape & Rhythm work in tandem to make a campaign more memorable.
A “fast” rhythm is typically better for getting remembered – if you feel like you’re getting swarmed by an idea, you’ve seen and remembered it. That effect is more pronounced if exposure is highly concentrated. But Shape matters a great deal – if you go deep and spend a lot of time with an ad in one moment, that’s memorable (credit: Dr. Karen Nelson-Field). If you feel like you’ve “found” the ad, you’ll remember it more than if you think it was targeted/pushed to you. The ARF has proved that cross-channel effects make an idea more memorable too.
Louder: Shape works together with Rhythm to make a campaign sticky.
Let’s make this a little more tangible using two of the best campaigns of 2023. Both are from the McDonald’s series of “Famous Order” campaigns but different in meaningful ways. All credit to W+K NY and the McD’s team – “Famous Orders” has built on what could have been a one-off moment in the 2020 Super Bowl with a series of different partnerships, collabs, and unique campaign moments that have come together to make this one of the most effective campaigns not just in restaurants but in any industry. Digging deeper:
There’s a clear rhythm in dripping out new – but different – chapters in this story. Cactus Jack, J Balvin, BTS, and Saweetie got it started (each chapter was designed to connect with a different subsegment of the McDonald’s customer base), then it got more interesting with 2023’s “As Featured In” and the Grimace Shake. Every single campaign flight taps into a different campaign shape.
“As Featured In” is tapping into nostalgia, so it requires a broad mix of assets and storylines to reinforce the unparalleled cultural impact of McD’s through the overwhelming barrage of iconic references. The Grimace Shake debacle manifested in a very different Shape (admittedly largely unplanned, but leaning into the resonance was a choice): a crescendo of amazingly creative, weird, and frankly disturbing memes implying that the Grimace Shake is zombifying anyone who drinks it. With 4 BILLION views on TikTok alone, we have even more proof that the Internet is wonderful sometimes.
Going further, there’s a clear difference in how the audiences for each of these campaigns are related to one another. The Grimace Shake took advantage of a tighter-knit group to spark contagion (mostly contained within TikTok, largely younger and very creatively inclined people). “As Featured In” was as broad and wide-ranging as possible – while it was a collection of sometimes niche references, the sheer weight of them all together created a “Total Pop” audience.
One connected brand campaign, with a set Rhythm over the course of several years and a distinct Shape for each chapter in how the assets, channels, and audiences build together.
The advertiser’s view of Shape is about channels, assets, and audiences and how they fit together. Are channels complementary (e.g., additive reach) or duplicative (e.g., compounding frequency)? How will each new asset added to the system expand what you remember about the brand? And how dense or dispersed is the audience – are people tightly interconnected or loosely affiliated? Shape also refers to the expected actions you want the audience to take after they come across your ads. That path of engagement is a pattern you’re trying to shape.
Rhythm, for the advertiser, is about orchestrating the right sequences of ideas for your audience to come across both within and across campaigns. Within a campaign, rhythm creates a crescendo of attention throughout the flight, engineering the ability for someone to be iteratively exposed to new parts of the idea (think multichannel effects, adding depth to an experience or distinct phases to the idea – the simplest of which would be “teaser” and “reveal”). Across campaigns, rhythm is choosing how to sequence major campaign moments. Does the business have seasonal changes? Prioritize different communities or audiences in some way? Require a consistent presence as new people find their way into your market?
That may still be loose for most. Just remember that it’s not about making this up from a blank sheet of paper – it’s about diagnosing and then opening doors. That’s how, at least for me, Shape and Rhythm become helpful ways to think about shaping the pattern that helps you reach the widest possible group of people and orchestrate different components of a campaign system to capture as much attention as possible.
Sorry, no SoundCloud to plug. Thanks for listening.