What Makes a Good Brand Awareness Campaign?

Usually when creating an ad campaign, there’s a very specific goal in mind. It’s meant to compel you to buy a product, donate to a cause, or go to a landing page. Then there’s the brand awareness campaign. As the name strongly implies, the goal of these is to make people aware of you. While being known is obviously important, “awareness” is a somewhat nebulous ask. 

We get asked to do a lot of awareness campaigns, and the truth is that a goal as broad as “awareness” is not as scary as it seems. There are still KPIs to focus on that indicate whether it’s working.

The Purpose of Awareness Campaigns

Awareness campaigns are designed to make a brand recognizable, memorable, and relevant to a specific audience. At their simplest, they communicate, “Here we are. We exist.” But their role goes much deeper than basic visibility.

A well-built awareness campaign helps shape how people understand a brand before they ever interact with a salesperson, visit a store, or make a purchase. It introduces the brand’s name, personality, promise, and position in the market. Over time, that familiarity creates a foundation for trust. According to research from Nielsen, consumers of all ages, regardless of channel, are more likely to act on an advertisement when they trust the brand. Awareness campaigns create familiarity among consumers which turns into trust over time.

Audiences are not ready to act the first time they encounter a brand. They may not need the product yet. They may not understand the problem yet. They may not even know they are in the target audience yet. Awareness campaigns help close that gap by making the brand easier to recognize when the need eventually appears.

These campaigns are particularly valuable for new companies, organizations entering new markets, businesses launching new services, or established brands going through a rebrand. In each case, the audience needs to understand who the brand is before they can be expected to choose it.

Brand awareness also plays an important role in long-term demand generation. Performance marketing often captures people who are already searching, comparing, or ready to act. Awareness marketing helps create more of those future people. It builds familiarity upstream so that when someone does enter the market, your brand has a better chance of being included in the consideration set.

The purpose of an awareness campaign is not simply to make noise but to create a familiarity with your audience that will pay off over time. You might not necessarily be trying to get them to act today, but down the road when they need whatever it is you sell, they'll think of you. Done well, it gives the audience a clear mental shortcut: they know who you are, what you stand for, and why you might matter when the time is right.

Case Study: Walmart’s “Who Knew?” Campaign

Unless you’re Brendan Fraser in “A Blast From the Past” and live in a bunker, you’ve seen this campaign. No one here can remember a commercial break they’ve seen in the past year that didn’t have at least one of these commercials. Walton Goggins is putting his children’s children’s children’s children through college. This is the quintessential awareness campaign. Walmart wants you to know something about the company more than they want you to act on it right this minute, and they are going to remind you about it every chance they get.

Lots of Ad Space

If your goal is awareness, running a commercial during every ad break on every channel  isn’t a bad place to start. This particular campaign being so omnipresent shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering Walmart is the largest company in the world.

Has An Angle

It’s easy for awareness campaigns to be generic, but even if the goal is to make people aware of Walmart, you can’t just have a 30-second commercial of the Walmart logo on screen. Yes, that would technically accomplish its goal of making people aware, but oh how soon they would forget.

Both the messaging and the creative need angles that are memorable and ownable. For messaging, you need to ask what exactly you want the audience to know about you. In Walmart’s case, it’s that their inventory of items is more extensive than you’d think.

The copywriting’s goal is to speak to the established The creative in an awareness campaign needs to be interesting and ownable. The “Who Knew?” slogan to the tune of “Who Are You” by The Who sticks in your head and reminds you of the message.

Casts a Wide Net

Especially for a brand like Walmart, whose target audience is basically everyone, they did an impressive job of casting a wide net. For all its jingly-ness, the ads never rise to the level of obnoxious and risk annoying people to the point where they make a U-turn on the highway to get to Target. There were probably also countless meetings at boardroom tables so long that the people on the opposite ends had to talk over Zoom before they landed on Goggins. Whoever was going to star in this campaign had to have incredible crossover appeal to just about the entire country. Goggins is most known for his role as a bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but he also tap dances when he hosts Saturday Night Live. He checks numerous boxes.

How Awareness Campaigns Have Evolved

Brand awareness campaigns used to be exclusively built around the biggest megaphone a brand could afford. Television, radio, print, outdoor, and sponsorships gave companies broad visibility by placing their message in front of as many people as possible. The logic was simple: the more people who saw or heard the brand, the more likely it was to become familiar.

That is still largely true, especially for brands trying to build regional recognition or broad category awareness, but targeting has also evolved. It's important for a company like Walmart to "cast a wide net" with their awareness campaign because they sell almost everything. They're trying to get business from pretty much every single person. But for slightly more niche companies, it's still critical to cast a wide net in terms of not alienating people.

That being said, even if you're being broad and welcoming with the messaging of your ads, today we have the capability to target consumers like never before. Mass-media exposure and buying up as much space as possible aren't the only ways to have a successful awareness campaign the way it was in the past. You can build awareness through highly specific audience targeting, behavioral data, and personalized media experiences.

The biggest shift has been from media to targeted distribution. Instead of asking, “How many people can we reach?” brands can now ask, “Which people matter most, and where are they most likely to pay attention?” That distinction matters. A campaign does not need to reach everyone to be effective. It needs to reach the right people often enough, with a message strong enough, to create recognition and relevance.

Data has also made awareness campaigns more strategic. Brands can use audience research, media consumption habits, website analytics, CRM data, search behavior, social engagement, and competitive insights to shape both the message and the media plan. This does not mean awareness campaigns have become purely mathematical. Creative still matters tremendously. But data helps remove some guesswork around who the campaign is for, where it should run, and what signals indicate that it is working.

Platforms like Google, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, streaming services, and programmatic ad networks do not simply distribute ads equally to everyone in a target audience. They optimize delivery based on behavior, engagement, predicted interest, and campaign objectives. That creates new opportunities for efficiency, but it also means brands need to understand how platform incentives shape visibility. An awareness campaign optimized for reach may behave differently than one optimized for video views, traffic, engagement, or conversions.

Awareness is the First Step to Consumer Trust

So while "awareness" seems like a vague goal for an ad campaign, it's actually a tangible and measure. Even if it's not as pointed as something that's meant to direct you to a specific landing page or buy a specific product, the awareness campaign is still essential. Awareness is a goal that should always be prioritized, regardless of what more specific strategies you have going on at the same time. Awareness campaigns should be frequent, and at the very least a stopgap between your other campaigns. If they cast a wide net and are memorable, there is incredible value to be had.

Now that you're aware of us, want to have a chat about your next ad campaign? Come have a chat in the office and you'll immediately be made aware of all our cool decor and freshly brewed coffee.