Keeping a channel alive between campaigns

What we were asked

The operator was good at campaigns. Three or four times a year the channels would light up, and between those bursts they went quiet, which meant every campaign had to rebuild an audience it had already paid for.

How we approached it

Always-on is a resourcing problem before it is a creative one. Anyone can plan twelve months of content; the reason it stops in month three is that nobody is staffed to produce it while a campaign is also in flight.

So we built the operation first and the calendar second.

What runs

• Four repeatable formats that can be produced at volume without a new concept each time, and one campaign-led slot that changes.
• A single calendar across all five platforms, so a message does not appear on one channel three days before another.
• A staffed response desk with escalation rules agreed in advance, because the difference between a complaint and a crisis is usually how long it sat unanswered.
• Paid and organic planned together, so the budget goes behind the posts that are already working rather than behind whatever was scheduled.
• One page of reporting a week. Longer reports get filed, not read.

What we would do differently

We under-resourced the response desk for the first two months and it showed in the queue times over one weekend. We staffed it properly after that. It is the kind of thing worth saying out loud in a case study, because every agency has a version of it and only some of them fix it.

What happened next

The engine runs, and campaign bursts now land on an audience that has been kept warm rather than on one that has to be rebuilt.