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Alessandro Panella, Managing Director for Serviceplan Consulting Group
Effective-Perspective

Effectiveness Essentials - Building an Effective Case: Alessandro Panella

This week Effectiveness Essentials explores creating a successful case study that tells your campaign's story, demonstrates it's strategy, and showcases it's effectiveness.

New York, New York | March 18, 2021

This week Effectiveness Essentials explores creating a successful case study that  tells your campaign's story, demonstrates its strategy, and showcases its effectiveness.

To provide the best insider  tips on how to create an effective case, we reached out to Alessandro Panella, Managing Director for Serviceplan Consulting Group, a brand and marketing consultancy that is part of the Serviceplan Group. In addition to Alessandro's role as an MD, he heads the CMO council: an exclusive group of C-Level marketeers that meet regularly to share their thoughts on current marketing challenges. Alessandro has worked with the following prestigious brands: Beck’s, Deutsche Telekom, P&G, Vodafone (Client side), Allianz, REWE, Swisslife, Google, Ferrero, Metro, and GSK.

This week, Effectiveness Essentials shares Alessandro's team's essential tips for creating an award-winning case.

Alessandro Panella: When we write cases, we put a particular attention to the following topics:

  • Don’t fill a form but tell a story: the most convincing cases are the ones who manage to engage the jury from the first line with a story that acts as a red threat from beginning to end. To get there it also helps to involve the person with the most heart for the campaign in the writing of the case study.
  • Be clear and concise: juries have a very limited time and read your case on their laptop or mobile: so, make it “reader friendly” by focusing on the most important elements.
  • Match the category: make sure the metrics you will use fit perfectly to the category. Sometimes entrants tend to use the data points that are most impressive and build a story around it. But if those metrics don’t fit the category, you’re entering the case in, it just weakens it.
  • Nail the insight: make sure you really have a powerful insight as the base of your creative strategy. If you have consumer research to back it up even better.
  • Context is key: Do not underestimate the importance of benchmarks - and providing reason for those benchmarks. Give enough context around the challenge, so that a judge that is not familiar with that category can understand why the situation for your brand was challenging. The best cases clearly articulated the challenge for the brand, the category and competitive landscape.
  • Make your idea shine: The idea is the pivot which turns the smart analysis of the problem into a unique solution that none of our competitors could emulate. Therefore, spend enough time in crafting the formulation of your ideas and demonstrating how it fits to your insight. Crafting the idea doesn’t mean writing a complex text to describe it. If you can’t describe your idea in one sentence, then that means there wasn’t an idea to start with.
  • Present results effectively: There should be clear proof that the communication campaign played a role in driving success. Make sure the way you present the results align with the objectives established upfront. Use simple graphs. Last but not least, make sure the results are “believable”. Jury members tend to be skeptical when they see an overachievement of +850% and think the objectives were simply not ambitious enough.