Are you on brand?

"My Jimmy Fallontine … your hair is perfect, all the time."

--Adam Sandler performing a parody of "My Funny Valentine" for the fifth anniversary of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”

Adam Sandler and Jimmy Fallon have been friends ever since their iconic days together on “SNL.” And Sandler appears to love nothing more than to poke fun at their friendship with a quip or a song when the red light is on.

Fallon? Yes, his hair is perfect, pretty much all the time. And he must love nothing more than to be in front of a camera when the red light is on. Because in addition to hosting “The Tonight Show,” he has created an entirely new show of which he is also host.

The new show is called “On Brand,” and it debuted on NBC in September. It is what Fallon calls a “business competition” show in which a team of handpicked creatives serve in a fictional agency called On Brand and compete to see who can come up with the most creative nationwide advertising campaigns for brands ranging from Marshall’s to KitchenAid to Captain Morgan to Dunkin’ – and thus win the title of “Innovator of the Year.” It’s part “Shark Tank,” because you stand up in front of a real CMO and present your idea. It’s also part “Survivor,” because every week someone is voted off the creative island.

Sounds like a good show to me. Then again, I co-lead a marketing and communications agency, and I teach college kids about advertising and brand strategy. I’m squarely in the target market. Are there enough others out there like me? We will see, but either way, here’s betting that Fallon’s hair stays perfect no matter what.

A multi-step journey

The implication of the show is that if you run a great advertising campaign, you are essentially “on brand.”

I agree that to be on brand it helps – a lot – to be running a great advertising campaign.

But this is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to being truly on brand. In my view, running a great advertising campaign is the second in a five-step process of truly being on brand. Step 1 is to develop your brand story. Call it your Unique Selling Proposition, or your USP. Call it your brand promise. Call it whatever you will – what is the one thing around which you want your story to evolve?

Step 2? Sure. Hire some great creative folks and let them go to town.

Step 3 to me is the most fun. Does your campaign cover advertising only? Paid media is great – in a world where marketers seem to have lost all control, advertising remains a stationary, above-the-surface object in a raging riptide. It’s kind of like that rock that Blake Lively was able to swim to just in time in “The Shallows.” Yes, her hair remained perfect despite desperately trying to evade a shark. But I digress.

Being on brand to me means never having to say you’re sorry you only spent your marketing dollars on advertising. (Yes, there was a movie reference there.) It means that you have balanced your dollars across as many marketing and/or communications channels that make sense. Is your digital advertising cross-platform? Did you consider sponsorships or branded events? What about ambient? Not to mention this: Have you gone national, or have you stuck with hyper-local? Better yet, have you split the difference and tested geo-targeting?

Which leads me to owned media. Is your campaign also plastered across your web site and social channels? If you are pursuing influencers to help spread the word, are you getting trapped by follower numbers and not looking at engagement rate?

And don’t even get me started on earned media. PR has always been the most credible channel of all. And now that AI has shown its affinity for the third-party sources of information that PR generates, earned media is more valuable than ever.

Step 4. The editorial calendar. Do you have one? Does it account for everything? Or are you too siloed, like too many marketing and/or communications organizations somehow still are?

How else do you know?

What?! Step 5? I almost forgot. Measurement. This is not the article for exploring the various ways to measure marketing and/or communications success. That topic deserves – no, demands – its own article. But let me ask you this: Even if you have knocked the ball out of the park across the first four steps in your march toward being on brand, have you paid adequate attention to Step 5? Too many companies do not. Which is really too bad, because if you are going to hire the best creatives to create the best creative, you deserve to know whether you are, in the end, on brand in the fullest sense of the description. And not just if your advertising campaign does well with recall.

For a marketer, there is nothing more important than being on brand. There is also nothing more victorious when you know you are. “I drink from the keg of glory,” Josh proclaimed to Donna after securing a key legislative win in “The West Wing.” His hair was far from perfect when he said it. But he was right.

Be on brand.

Drink from the keg of glory.

Most of us think we are on brand.

Many of us are not. At least not in the fullest sense of the description.

Are you?

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