Bad marketing team thinks in mediums and platforms. Good marketing thinks in terms of insights and ideas.
Netflix proved it. To market The Last House, they didn’t run posters. They built a fully furnished, air-conditioned living room 30 feet above the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Selma Avenue, with an actual human performer inside for three days.
That’s insight-first. That’s idea-first.
The old model, allocating budgets according to mediums and segments like performance and brand, is completely outdated. But most marketing teams in India still operate this way. Which means they hit the same wall every time: Which medium does this campaign live in? If it’s OOH, we stretch the OOH budget. If it bleeds into digital, we need permission to pull from digital. We have to take permission.
Each medium is siloed. Each budget is gated. Each channel has its own approval structure.
The outcome is predictable: ideas either shrink to fit the budget boxes, or they don’t get proposed at all.
The fundamental fix is structural. You don’t change the team. You change how the team thinks. Stop allocating by mediums. Stop asking which platform. Ask: What’s the insight? Where does this idea need to live to work?
Great marketing teams are already doing this.
If your organisation is still organised by medium, that’s an ROI problem.
And guess what? The the marketing teams which are succeeding across the world have CMOs who don’t think in mediums.
A live example:
:Bistro ran this in India, and it’s basically an out-of-home delivery service that delivers tea. Good idea, smart.
I’m sure a bunch of marketers on LinkedIn will share it and say, “Oh, that’s nice.”
But on the same budget, could they have 2x or 5x the ROI?
Yes, they could.
I would channel real Bistro orders via digital so that people are surprised when this van comes to them to deliver tea. And if it was a problem to do that for existing because of app changes, then I would just run it as a Twitter campaign with a click to pay.
Instead of them paying in money, I would refund 2x the amount to whoever clicks a photo and uploads it on social media there-’pay with a photo. The problem with this can’t ever be done if the marketing team thinks that this is out of home, something is digital, et cetera. (And by the way, this is a top-of-the-head idea. Once one sits on it, you can integrate multiple. You can have the campaign flowing across, and the same idea can be 10x bigger with 0.3 x more spend)
DM me if you want to fix it for your marketing team www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/
-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO
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