Zepto’s IPO Document Should Worry Every CMO

Decades back, David Ogilvy asked us to be suspicious of awards. I wish we had listened.

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I found it a little strange that Cannes was happening at a time when the advertising industry is sinking. We’re behaving like the folks on the Titanic — busy singing and dancing, not paying attention to the iceberg in front of us. Not to complain, but to try and do something before we hit the iceberg.

I’m not averse to awards.

I think they’re a great way to recognise work — my own has won two, and I’ve been nominated for one.

One of the ones that won, I 100% didn’t deserve — I only got it because it was a big brand. But that was 12-14 years back, when awards still sometimes meant something and there was some ethics around the process. Now, awards can literally be bought or sold, or you just ping a buddy on the panel to give you one.

But importantly, beyond awards, there’s another thing worth questioning about what we celebrate in advertising: is it actually good for the business or the brand — or just good for the people running the marketing?

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Zepto is a textbook case.

Look at the IPO documents and you realise how badly the marketing has actually performed.

Over the last few years we celebrated its out-of-home stunts — the fake wedding campaign and the rest of it. I still don’t know what a fake wedding had to do with groceries, but sure, buzz is buzz. Wonder why all of that didn’t translate into a decreasing CAC and an increasing TAM%.

Or the string of random gimmicks that didn’t really inspire confidence in the business but got people talking — because Zepto optimised for getting people to talk, not for getting people to trust the business.

See, it’s one thing to fail in marketing. We all do that. It’s not a sure-sure science. But there’s another thing entirely — to never try to run marketing to get attention to marketing itself versus the product. In fact, David Ogilvy’s code explicitly warned against that.

That’s the fundamental problem with a lot of marketing awards: they tend to acknowledge the crazy over the simple and insightful. And it’s often the simple, insightful work that actually moves the needle — for the customer and for the business.

To be clear — I like crazy too. One of my own campaigns, Spreading Chi, was a crazy idea — but it had a very clear link to the business.

If there’s only buzz, with no one even understanding what the brand or business does, then what’s the point of the buzz?

Advertising’s downfall, and Zepto’s IPO document, should make us think: what are we really celebrating?

What’s the actual benchmark for marketing?

-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/