hello delight

One of the key early decisions a planner has to make in constructing digital campaigns is what type of math to use:  Top down or bottom up.

Top down planning is the traditional way.  You approach a tactic with reach in mind and make estimates on total market size, receptivity rate, conversion rate, etc.  At the end, you have a rough idea of the people you'll reach.

Bottom up is different.  You target a few customers in known watering holes and incent them to become marketers for you.

Either method can be effective at building an audience (people that want to hear what you have to say) and brands are pretty proficient at both.  Where things get dicier is phase two:  Engagement.

Engagement has its own set of math too.  For starters, there is the heuristic that says there is a 10 to 1 ratio of creators to comments, and another 10 to 1 of commentors to consumers.

This is the math that's most often forgotten.

Brands tend to think of engagment as only reaching the 1% of creators.  This is evidenced by campaigns that ask you to make a video, write a sonnet, doodle.   Brands don't often get the engagement levels they want because the design was flawed.  No matter how good your idea is, there is a default gesture in society that says "creating is time consuming".  The miss for lots of brands is not engaging the 10% or the 90%.  

Adding a little girth to campaigns so that your users can comment or just consume, and even making that part of the game, should be something digital marketers strive for if engagement is really the key.