That's Interesting!

If creativity pays, why can’t it get paid? My experience of the past 30 years lines up with the analysis of Peter Field: the shift to short(er)-term thinking devalues creativity’s unique power to create long-term brand growth. Clients are like farmers and a farmer who intends to sell in one year makes very different decisions from a farmer who intends to pass it down to his children. Of course, creativity can also have powerful short-term effects, but they appear smaller and less certain than more direct and ‘rational’ activation appeals. It seems as though rising numbers of people are eager to chop down their cherry trees for firewood before they have a chance to bear fruit. Yes, the wood will burn, but cherries are much more profitable than firewood. The febrile metabolism of finance capitalism is not yet under control. But in the meantime, I would like to modestly (both humbly and in a limited fashion) suggest that we might help ourselves in the branding and getting paid department...

I was recently at a presentation on sonic branding where a producer from one of the world's biggest music production houses showed a series of interesting case studies, all of which focused on how the notes had been generated: throwing nuts at taiko drums, dropping hardware onto piano strings and generally whacking unlikely objects against unlikelier surfaces in order to come up with a memorable melodic signature. I asked him later why all the stories were about timbre (the sound) and none of them were about the musical notes, which all, in fact, sounded pretty similar. He sighed (at least, in my memory, he sighed) and said that the issue was the client briefs. They're all variations on the same three words: Happy. Uplifting. Optimistic. Nobody wants suspended chords, open intervals, colour notes, tempo changes or any of the other tools that composers have available to create distinctive, memorable music that sticks with you. It's all 'dum-dee-dee-dum-dum.' I think ...

Marketing has to create memories. The memories need to have certain qualities (e.g. branded, salient, etc.) but none of that matters if you don’t make a memory in the first place. So, how do you make a memory? In The Seven Sins of Memory ( https://lnkd.in/euRrvGr3 ), psychologist Daniel Schacter begins by describing the different ways in which memory fails; namely, through three sins of omission (transience, absent-mindedness, blocking) and four sins of commission (misattribution, suggestibility, bias, persistence). The most pervasive of these is transience, the simple fading away that occurs with the passage of time: “Incomplete rather than total forgetting that leaves in its wake scattered shards of experience. Vague impressions of familiarity, general knowledge of what happened, or fragmentary details of experiences, are the most common legacies of transience.” (And most day-after recall results.) But Schacter also wants to give readers science-based advice on how to combat transien...

The ad industry has a significant blind spot when it comes to ROI: The Creative. The quest for improved ROI comes down to the question of efficiency. For two decades, marketers built their communications structures around the media approach to efficiency - getting in front of people in the least expensive way when and where it matters most, not necessarily how it matters most. Advertising Week just wrapped in NYC. The program and the speakers were more of the same. Most of the tracks were sponsored by Adtech platforms and data companies that provide information to help advertisers 'optimize' advertising for their platforms and ad investment across channels. But there are two parts to the efficiency formula: reducing the cost and increasing the impact. What there wasn't much of at Advertising Week, was creative people talking about the kind of work that makes a big impact on audiences. In other words, making creative resources more productive. You might think that maximi...

I think that Dale Carnegie was the first to advise, “To be interesting, be interested.” But in context, it becomes clear that he was actually talking about being liked, not being interesting. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is full of salespeople learning that showing interest in what your potential client is interested in is a more fruitful way to get a foot in the door than talking about your product. So, in addition to being about liking rather than interest, it’s also more appropriate advice for early 20th-century travelling salespeople on cold calls than early 21st-century marketers. It's not that being liked is unimportant. It’s just not the same thing as being interesting. They’re not mutually exclusive, just different, and if you confuse the two, you’ll end up doing only the first step in being interesting which is understanding what your audience is interested in. The next step is turning that information into an ongoing series of things that they will find wort...

I don't buy the accepted explanations of why Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign was so successful. It is universally used as a model of great advertising, and it is, by any measure. But the analysis seems unfulfilling. The most prevalent reasons to explain its success are: 1.     Smart targeting: target the buyer (women) instead of the user (men). 2.     Entertainment value: the power of humor, originality and unexpected storyline. 3.     Interactivity: the “Response” campaign , the real-time aspect inviting fans to view the next video to interact with. And by inference, time spent/engagement with the advertising meant forming a stronger bond with the brand that presumably led to purchase. Yes, bringing women into the conversation is a smart strategy. And yes, the interactivity of the response campaign is fun. And yes, the combination of genius copywriting, acting, and directing makes it entertaining to wa...