Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to adapt one campaign across media
The idea travels. The execution does not. Build the tightest piece first and let the roomier media expand from it, never the other way round.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 8 min read
One campaign across five media is not one advertisement resized five times. The idea travels; the execution is rebuilt every time, because a person driving past a hoarding, a person with a newspaper at breakfast and a person scrolling at eleven at night are doing three different things. The practical rule is to build the tightest piece first. Write the ten-second radio script and the six-word hoarding line before you shoot anything, and let the roomier media expand from what survived.
What stays fixed, and what gets rebuilt
Six things do not change anywhere. The brand name, spelled and written the same way, including in Kannada. The logo and the one colour people will recognise from across a road. The claim. The offer and the conditions attached to it. The face or the product shot people will start to associate with you, which is what a campaign key visual is for. And the way you are contacted.
Everything else is rebuilt: the sentence, the crop, the length, the amount of detail, the call to action and the register of the language. A hoarding line has no verb. A newspaper headline can carry a condition. A radio sign-off has to be sayable. They are three expressions of one claim, not one sentence pasted three times.
Build from the tightest constraint outward
Most campaigns are made in the wrong order. The film gets shot because it is the exciting part, and then everything else becomes a squashed film: a hoarding with a frame grab and four lines of copy, a radio spot that is the film's voiceover read fast, a newspaper ad that is the storyboard printed.
Turn it around. Six words for the hoarding. Ten seconds for the radio. One vertical frame with the sound off. If the idea still stands up in all three, the thirty-second film and the half-page in the paper will write themselves, and they will be recognisably the same campaign.
The shoot is where all of this is won or lost, and it costs nothing extra to plan for on the day.
Ask for three things per set-up. The widest frame, with room left on the side where the headline will sit. The vertical frame for reels and stories, shot as its own composition rather than cropped later. And a clean plate with no people in it, for the versions where the type has to be huge.
Leave the space empty. A photograph filled edge to edge is a photograph that cannot become a hoarding, and a face cropped out of a wide shot arrives with the top of its head missing.
One campaign, six media
| Medium | What the piece is | What has to change |
|---|---|---|
| Hoarding | Six words, one image, the name big | Everything except the claim and the colour. No number, no detail |
| Newspaper | Headline, the offer with its conditions, address, deadline | Detail comes back in. It is read once, at a table |
| Radio | Ten to thirty seconds, name early and late | The line becomes sayable. Nothing visual survives |
| Television or OTT | The film, with the claim spoken and shown | Written for a room, with sound on |
| Meta and YouTube | Vertical, sound off, the claim inside the frame | The first line does the work of the whole ad |
| WhatsApp and in store | The offer as a message and a counter card | Written for somebody already buying, with the conditions plainly stated |
Read the table down the last column and the point of the exercise is clear. The same claim is doing six different jobs.
The calendar is set by the slowest piece
Lead times are not close to each other. A Meta ad goes live in an hour. A newspaper file has to reach the paper a couple of days before the insertion. Printed outdoor material needs artwork, printing and a mounting night. A metro panel needs the authority's approval before printing even starts.
So the launch date is decided by the slowest piece, and once that file goes to print the offer is frozen. Every campaign that changes its offer in week two has a hoarding contradicting it for another three weeks.
Write the offer and its conditions in one place, get it signed off once, and make every medium quote from that document rather than from the last version somebody emailed.
Count each medium separately
Put a separate phone number on the hoarding, a different one in the radio spot, and a web address of its own in the newspaper ad. Same landing page, same offer, different route in.
Then add the one measurement people skip. Offline media send people to search two days later, so record searches for your own name and direct visits to the site for four weeks before the campaign and watch them through it. For example, a jeweller running a Ugadi campaign on radio, in the papers and on Instagram will see the paper produce walk-ins on the day and the radio produce searches for the shop name all week.
The test before you approve anything
Lay every piece on one table. The hoarding proof, the newspaper ad, a still from the film, the reel, the counter card. Cover the logos.
Two questions. Can a stranger tell these came from one business? And can they tell you what the offer is from each one on its own, without seeing the others? A campaign that fails the first test is five advertisements. One that fails the second is relying on people seeing all five, which nobody does.
What to do next
Write the offer document first, then the hoarding line and the radio script, then book the shoot. Set the calendar from the print deadline backwards. Running the pieces to one calendar is what our integrated marketing campaigns work is. If your media is already booked for a festive window and the creative has not started, tell us which weeks and which media, and we will work out what can still be made in time.