Earlier this year, the strategist Oren John shared a short visual essay on the art of the modern marketing campaign. It has stayed with me, because it describes the way I want every launch to work. Here are its ideas, mapped onto a campaign I worked on this autumn: The Intense Diaries, a short series with Aliona Gris for Sol de Janeiro’s Intense Perfume Mists.
A moment, not a post
A campaign is a coordinated moment that gathers attention around one launch or one idea. One post can be part of it. One ad can be part of it. Neither is the campaign.
For the Intense Perfume Mists, the moment was a story: Aliona planning an event, everything going wrong, one scent per episode. A trailer, three episodes, replies, behind the scenes, a paid creator round alongside. Each piece pointed at the same idea.
Three layers
Every campaign has three layers, and missing one makes the rest collapse:
- Strategy, the why: who it is for and what should change.
- Content, the assets: films, stills, posts, captions.
- The world, everything outside the feed: the set, the people, the places, the press.
Insight, concept, ideally both
A launch starts from an insight, a real behaviour or desire, or from a concept strong enough to earn attention on its own. The best have both. The insight here: Aliona’s audience loves her drama and her humour. The concept: a telenovela in which she plays herself, so the brand could be dramatic without pretending.
Own, extend, partner
A strategy reaches people through three channels: your own (social, site, newsletter, ads), extensions (retail, events, pop-ups) and partners (creators, collaborations, affiliates). The last one is how a campaign escapes the brand’s own follower count. The Intense Diaries ran on Aliona’s channels, not only the brand’s, and that is where most of the views came from.
The sequence: most brands stop at step three
A real launch unfolds in steps. Mapped onto this one:
- Tease. The trailer, on 4 October, with the date of episode one in the caption.
- Unveil. Episode one, a speech, a stage and the first scent.
- Launch. Episodes two and three, two days apart, each with its own mist.
- Extend. Replies to comments and behind-the-scenes posts while attention was high.
- Amplify. A paid creator round in the same weeks, nine talents in one window.
- Refresh. A thank-you post that brought the series back into the feed.
In its first two weeks the series reached 6.04M people with 9.04M views across 31 posts, and $453.1K in earned media value. The trailer alone passed 5.8M views on TikTok. The full case is on The Intense Diaries project page.
What to take from it
Plan the moment, not the post. Decide the why before the assets. Build the world around the feed. And keep going after launch day, because that is where most of the value is. If you are planning a launch in the German-speaking market, that is the structure I bring, through content strategy and influencer marketing.
Source and inspiration: Oren John, “The art of the modern marketing campaign”, Substack note, January 2026.
