This article argues that ‘return on investment’ (ROI) is a malevolent metric that sits at the heart of many marketing discussions and decisions. I believe that the many marketers who prioritise this metric seek to capture value, but unintentionally destroy it. And there is three reasons for this. To maximise ROI marketers must prioritise efficiency over effectiveness. They must reduce their media…
In advertising, using emotion is entirely logical. Creative agencies have made this case consistently. But in 2013 Les Binet and Peter Field bought some much-needed data to the discussion. In their seminal report, The Long and The Short of It, the duo analysed 30 years of IPA effectiveness award submissions. The study found that emotional campaigns outperformed rational campaigns on every brand…
The shift to music streaming has led to songs getting shorter, music getting less melodically diverse and lyrics getting more repetitive. Or to put it another way, just as our visual culture has become more homogeneous, so too has the music that accompanies it. Let’s run through these arguments one by one.
In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a collaboration with the people of a different country and culture. But it didn’t quite go to plan. Every…
A storm is coming. In 2020 Britain suffered its deepest recession in over 300 years. Two years later and the UK’s economic picture is not much prettier. This article argues that whilst recessions are a threat to some businesses, they are an opportunity for others. It argues that brands can not only survive a downturn but thrive in one. It explores five principles that will help your brand be one…
To make a big impact, we need a big idea. In brand communications, coveting the ‘big idea’ is commonplace. We look for them. Long for them. Laud them and lionise them. And yet, despite its ubiquitous use, the ‘big idea’ remains incredibly ill-defined. This article is an attempt to change that. It argues that ‘big ideas’ are ‘big’ because they spread in three directions. They go long, spreading…
We live in the era of efficiency. The advertising industry is infatuated with it. Intoxicated by it. Enamoured and enthralled by it. We want our teams to be lean. Our processes to be agile. And our output to be optimised. Instead of focussing on making our work bigger, we focus on making it work harder. Instead of aiming to maximise our impact, we aim to minimise our waste. A century ago, American…
We spend eight hours a day thinking about the brands we build. Many of us more. We consider our clients’ companies and the categories in which they compete. We visit the sites in which our products are produced and the stores in which they are sold. We analyse their adverts and comb through their campaigns. But as our knowledge of a brand expands, so too does the distance that divides our audience…
Marketers are prone to a prediction. You’ll find them in the annual tirade of trend decks. In the PowerPoint projections of self-proclaimed prophets. In the feeds of forecasters and futurists. To understand the extent of our forecasting fascination, I analysed the websites of three management consultancies. In total, these three companies’ make just shy of 15,000 predictions stretching out over…
Purpose is polarising. There are those who promote it as a paragon of positioning and a silver-bullet strategy for success. Then there are those who refute purpose’s power and dispute its capacity to connect with consumers. It is clearly a debate that divides. For every success story we have a plethora of painted-on purposes that have missed the mark and fallen flat. Brand purpose does not…
Big data is big news. Search for it and Google will return 75 million results. That’s a different article for every 100 people on earth. There are also 18 million videos on the topic. At 5 minutes each, it would take 170 years to watch them all. Then there’s the one million books on the subject. Stacked on top of each other they’d form a tower 58 times taller than the Empire State Building.…
We believe we work in turbulent times. A quick skim of the industry press and you’ll learn that ecommerce is upending retail. Social media is uprooting advertising. Private labels are replacing brands. Advertising is dying. And TV is dead. We believe change is the new normal. That its pace is accelerating. That technological adoption is faster than ever. That unicorn company’s are constantly being…
The advertising industry is addicted to youth. We are obsessed and possessed. We crave it in our agencies and we covet it in our audiences. We believe younger staff are more creative and younger consumers are more valuable. But this is nothing more than received wisdom. Dogma upon which we have all been indoctrinated. Spurious beliefs and specious myths; unquestioned, unfounded and ultimately…
The advent of digital media promised so much. Savvy shoppers would no longer be surreptitiously swayed by advertising alone. The internet would enable them to research products. Social media would allow them to share their experiences. And ecommence would provide the power to compare prices. Unfortunately, this pledge is increasingly looking like a pipe dream. A far-flung fiction. An unattainable…
It seems that a day doesn’t pass without another article hitting the headlines exposing the shortcomings of the Millennial generation. It seems we are obsessed with the concept of demographic cohorts. Or, to put it more specifically, we are obsessed with the idea that different generations have radically different beliefs and behaviours. I believe this perspective is fundamentally flawed. This…