Campaigns should start with a strong concept.

Key Takeaways

1. A concept gives campaigns direction

A strong concept ensures every creative, media and KPI aligns to one story. Without it, campaigns risk fragmentation and lack impact.

2. Media should serve the story

Targeting tools and data only work when amplifying a narrative. The concept comes first, media choices follow.

3. Concepts build long-term value

Story-led campaigns resonate beyond short-term KPIs, creating relevance, memory and brand loyalty.

Campaigns Should Always Start With a Strong Concept

In today’s noisy and fragmented digital landscape, it is tempting for marketers to open a campaign brief by focusing on audiences, data dashboards, or media planning spreadsheets. KPIs are defined, personas are drawn up, and audience targeting maps are created before a single creative idea has even been discussed.

This approach has become the default in many organisations, but it is ultimately backwards. Audiences, media formats and KPIs should be tools that serve the campaign – not the starting point. What comes first is the story you want to tell.

A campaign without a strong concept is like a house without foundations. It might look adequate at first glance, but the structure will be fragile, and over time it will fail to hold up. Conversely, when a brand story drives the strategy, everything else becomes sharper, more cohesive and infinitely more effective.

Why Concepts Trump Media Planning

A concept is not simply an idea for an advert. It is the overarching narrative that explains why your brand exists, why it matters, and why people should care. It provides the emotional glue that ties together creative assets, copywriting, media choices, and measurement frameworks.

When brands rush into media planning before landing on a strong concept, several problems emerge:

Fragmented Campaigns – Creative is produced reactively to fit the media plan, often resulting in generic or uninspiring content.
Inefficient Spend – Audience segmentation and targeting without a guiding story can lead to wasted impressions and poorly performing campaigns.
Short-term Thinking – KPIs are chased at the expense of long-term brand equity, creating campaigns that deliver numbers on paper but fail to resonate emotionally.
Over-reliance on Data – While data is powerful, it cannot replace the need for a human-centred narrative that inspires, entertains, or challenges the audience.

Digital tools today allow for incredible granularity – down to behaviours, interests and personal tastes – which makes it even more important that the creative concept is meaningful. The tools can then amplify and refine that story rather than lead it.

Lessons From Traditional Advertising

Even in traditional advertising, the mistake of starting with media before creative has been widespread. For decades, brands would book a prime-time TV slot and only then begin creating the advert. The logic was: “We’ve got 30 seconds on ITV at 8pm – now let’s make something to fill the space.”

That approach made sense when media buying was scarce, expensive, and dominated by mass broadcast. Today, however, digital advertising gives us flexibility, sequencing, interactivity, and personalisation. Why would we still create work backwards – filling formats instead of crafting stories?

Airbnb: A Case Study in Concept-Led Campaigning

One of the best recent examples of concept-first thinking comes from Airbnb and its Adventures product launch. The company wanted to reach a new market hungry for more authentic, local travel experiences, particularly among millennials.

Step 1: Start With a Narrative

The central idea was to portray travel not as a transaction – booking accommodation – but as an adventure. Airbnb chose six experiences from its portfolio, each showcasing a different style, taste, or activity. These mini stories formed the backbone of the campaign.

Step 2: Build Creative To Fit the Story

Airbnb produced video content that brought these adventures to life. Instead of a single generic advert, they crafted multiple narratives to reflect different passions and lifestyles – from food journeys to outdoor challenges.

Step 3: Match Storytelling To the Right Format

To deliver this narrative, Airbnb chose YouTube Ad Sequencing. This allowed them to break down each story into stages, mixing short- and long-form video formats that unfolded sequentially. It felt like a journey – not a blunt interruption.

Step 4: Define Audiences Based on Behaviour, Not Demographics

Only after the creative was complete did Airbnb decide on audiences. Importantly, these were not based on age, postcode, or generic personas. Instead, audiences were built from interests, behaviours and tastes – for example, people who consistently engaged with travel or outdoor content.

The Results

The outcome was staggering. The campaign delivered a conversion rate 40 times higher than the overall account average. People were not only watching the stories but actively visiting the Airbnb Adventures website to learn more.

The lesson is clear: when creative leads, media amplifies.

Applying This Thinking Beyond YouTube

Airbnb used YouTube because sequencing and storytelling tools are well established on the platform. But the principle can be applied almost anywhere.

Meta Platforms (Facebook & Instagram): Sequential storytelling can be built through remarketing windows – showing audiences new creative based on their previous interactions with your ads.
TikTok: Campaigns can be structured like episodic content, each video building upon the last, encouraging binge-watching behaviour.
Programmatic Display: Creative narratives can be sequenced and adapted dynamically, ensuring that audiences see different chapters of a story rather than the same static banner.
Out-of-Home & Experiential: Even offline channels can follow a narrative arc, particularly when combined with digital retargeting to extend the journey.

The point is not the channel. The point is the concept that drives it.

How To Start With a Concept: A Practical Framework

For many brands and agencies, the difficulty lies in knowing how to start with a concept. Here’s a framework we use at One Day Agency:

Define the Core Story – What is the emotional or cultural truth you want to highlight? Is it joy, challenge, discovery, rebellion, belonging?
Craft the Narrative Arc – Decide how this story unfolds. Does it start with a problem and resolve with your brand? Does it take people on a journey?
Identify Creative Expressions – Explore how the story could be visualised or dramatised through different formats – film, static, copy, interactive, experiential.
Select the Right Media – Only once the creative is mapped should you choose the media channels and formats that best tell the story.
Tailor the Audiences – Build audiences based on behaviours and interests that align with the narrative, not on demographic stereotypes.
Establish KPIs That Support the Story – Instead of chasing vanity metrics, define success measures that align with engagement, resonance and long-term brand value.

Why This Matters for Brands Today

Consumers today are savvier than ever. They scroll past thousands of ads daily, filter what they engage with, and increasingly seek authenticity. A functional or transactional advert is rarely enough.

A well-told story, however, cuts through. It can stop someone mid-scroll, invite them into a brand world, and foster genuine connection. With digital’s ability to personalise and sequence, storytelling can now be delivered at scale.

For brands, this is the real opportunity: to combine the timeless power of narrative with the precision of modern targeting.

The One Day Philosophy

At One Day Agency, this thinking sits at the heart of our work. We refuse to treat creative, media, and digital as separate silos. Instead, we fuse them into a single integrated process that always begins with a concept.

Our belief is simple: a campaign without a strong story is noise. A campaign with a strong story is influence.

Final Word

Stop obsessing about audiences, media plans or KPIs in isolation. Stop writing briefs that lead with platform specifications or budget allocations. Start with the question: what is the story we want to tell, and why does it matter?

Everything else – the media mix, the targeting, the KPIs – should exist only to serve that story.

Concept first. Execution second. That is how you create campaigns that truly resonate.

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