A couple of philosophies

Yesterday David and I were running training in Sydney on objectives and target audiences. We came up with a couple of succint lines which we wanted to share.

First, our philosophy when it comes to writing good, simple objectives:-

Objectives should be SMART and helpful. SMART is easy - specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Helpful means that when you have a good objective it helps you find the solution, it gives you direction to find your way through the complexity and deliver a nice simple idea. So, awareness doesn't git the bill that well as it doesn't often give you that much direction - any solutioon can raise awareness. But, "to help people realize how much they love Big Macs" is helpful because it immediately gives you some clues as to how you might proceed. (Not forgetting to make it SMART too!)

Second, our philosophy on target audiences:-

Your chosen source of volume should be small enough to be interesting but big enough to matter. The smaller (read: more focused / cohesive) your audience is the better insights you can get. But it needs to be big enough to support the scale of the objectives, ie to matter.

Rob