10 cross-media campaign secrets

1: Understand the audience
Daniele Fiandaca
CEO (Europe), Profero

"The best cross-media campaigns have a really good and simple idea at their core, executed within the media which best suits the audience. Understand where the audience is and then make sure that you use the media appropriately to bring the idea to life. It is not about matching luggage."

2: Suit the message to the medium
Ben Clapp
Creative director, Spike
"The key to creative success is to understand, interpret and execute the idea appropriately in each category. Moving from offline to online may mean changing the tone of the piece to have more cut-through, or 'breaking the fourth wall', letting people interact with the work, get involved and share ownership."

3: Don't obsess with online
Hoss Gifford
Digital director, Marque
"It's important that each medium is given the freedom to stray from the campaign sufficiently to capitalise on it's own strengths. Five years ago, online campaigns were creatively limited by the primary medium - usually television or print. Now I fear online may be limiting the creative possibilities of offline mediums."

4: Play the fame game
Hugh Baillie
Chief executive, Ogilvy Advertising
"[Create] an asset that you can build your campaign around, which transfers across a lot of different media. So, in the old world, the orange man in Tango [ads] could be transferred around lots of places. The Cadbury's gorilla does that. It's simple, understandable and generates fame."

5: Think usefulness and context
Jon Bains
Founder, Lateral
"You want something that's multi-threaded, that's going to engage in lots of different ways, and ideally something that helps [the public] do something that they hadn't necessarily appreciated that they wanted or needed to do. [With] social media, it's about ideas that are genuinely behaviour-driven and have a social context."

6: Don't be isolated
Jens Bachem
MD, Digital Outlook
"Genuine cross-media campaigns that really engage the audience are incredibly rare. Agencies tend to work in silos. In my view, we need a single audience-led, shared campaign objective - purchase intent, for argument's sake - with every media specialist heavily incentivised to deliver against it."

7: Single out a visionary
Kieron Leppard
Usability experience architect, Fortune Cookie
"There needs to be someone at the front with a clear vision of what needs to be achieved. They're the person who's really going to champion the campaign, who really understands what you're trying to achieve as a group rather than as separate work streams."

8: Don't leash ideas to one post
Richard Neville
MD, Spike
"Make sure your idea is not tied to one particular platform (such as TV). We think the key is to have an idea capable of interaction. That doesn't mean it absolutely has to be digital. It just needs to be something that your audience feels it can get involved in."

9: Be inspired by the product
Tom Hume
MD, Future Platforms
"It's about trying to blur the lines between campaign and product. If you look at the things that agencies like RGA are doing, things like Nokia viNe or Nike+, it's more about producing a service that emphasises a brand's values than it is creating an ad campaign and microsite."

10: Be imaginative about physical space
Ross Taylor
Chief digital officer, TMW
"Digital doesn't mean simply doing what you used to do [in a space] but quicker. You can change the entire way in which you think about that space, how you tie it into your mobile strategy, your social strategy, link to your advertising and use it more effectively than before."