The power of extreme focus. One audience. One objective. One message.

How HOOPP embraced a targeted 1:1:1 approach and saw an amazing response.

IT APPEARS to be incredibly counterintuitive.

We get push back.

We’re often asked how our contacts will internally justify the spend.

Standard responses range from, “we’re going to spend all our budget on that?” to “our original brief clearly stated that we wanted to do a whole lot more.”

I’m of course talking about our universal love of overloading projects.

It’s so tempting to hope and dream that a single campaign, a single pot of money can be stretched across multiple use cases, multiple targets, and whole hosts of different corporate objectives for different stakeholders (often with competing interests).

And while we can all chuckle and agree that this is a familiar sentiment, it takes a certain boldness, focus, and belief in the project for an internal marketer or communications professional to gently push back against these political forces (something I’ll readily admit as an external partner we don’t have to deal with day to day).

All this to say, we recently found ourselves in this familiar situation with The Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP).

Having had the opportunity to work closely with HOOPP on a number of different projects in recent years, when we were presented with a new project to position their pension plan to a new target group we immediately honed in on the core objectives, needs and target audiences.

And it’s for this one reason that I wanted to share their project and story.

As we worked through the initial strategy and creative development, to HOOPP’s credit they were willing and eager to be challenged.

They were willing to hone in on an extremely targeted approach.

And while it may have been easier to justify the campaign to stakeholders by focusing on three or four different target groups, with half a dozen different distribution points, and a list longer then my arm of different objectives – they agreed that it wasn’t going to produce the positive outcome they were looking for.

Defined Benefit Pension Plan – Professionally Managed by HOOPP

Sometimes, less is more.

WHAT WE’VE come to call the 1:1:1 approach is really very, very simple.

If a given communication channel will allow for it, we focus on a single, one, uno, objective for the content marketing campaign (in this case a video). We focus all efforts on a single, well-defined target audience. And we focus on the single, clear message that will motivate the target audience to achieve our corporate objective.

It’s so simple.

But, as I mentioned earlier it takes tremendous courage because we’re essentially disregarding other targets, uses and objectives. And the prospect of not targeting all these other ‘low hanging fruit’ is either too enticing or painful for most people to handle.

And it’s understandable.

Of course we want our spend to stretch as far as it can.

We don’t want to miss opportunities.

We all want work that actually works!

Behind the Scenes: On-Set With HOOPP

Only targets truly appreciate targeted content.

SO YOU may watch the HOOPP video and not connect with it – that’s okay with me.

Because the response within the public pension community and within the target audience group has been tremendous.

We’re really proud of the project. That’s why we want to share it with you. But more than the video itself, we’re really proud of our client, HOOPP.

I hope you’ll forgive me for a moment as I toot our own horn.

At Phanta we’re all about the #Extraordinary.

And while for some clients that can be seen within the technical, visual or creative we produce for them; with this project we’re proud of the entire process.

Strong strategy and creative, a hard focus on executing against that strategy and creative, and a willingness from our client to come along for the ride. All great things.

But what we’re most thrilled by is that the project we spent so much time and effort on is the talk of the town within the public pension community… and of course, that our target audience connects with the video.

Here are a few screenshots from the video.