Precision Marketing at Scale (and why I joined aperture)
There is an opportunity to do marketing better and more scalably without resorting to the snake oil
Beware the seduction of adtech
In one of my favorite Structural Shifts podcasts so far, episode 14 with Paul Mellor on “Putting Marketing Strategy above Tactics”, there is a great discussion on adtech. This section from Paul sums it up pretty nicely:
The sell [of adtech] is: there’s no wastage. Well, of course, but the flip side is… no one notices what you’re saying because marketing works on broadcast, not narrow cast.
The point Paul makes is right. Absent the signalling effect of marketing built up through common social and cultural associations of a brand –what Tony Schwartz might call “the Responsive Chord” — and marketing is rendered much less effective.
Add to that poor execution. Because adtech gives the impression that only the medium matters, marketers neglect the basics. As Paul notes, “89% of ads are immediately forgotten”.
However, there are other problems too. Adtech came to prominence in the murky pre-GDPR world where we were served up ads without our permission and its effectiveness was increasingly blunted by ad blockers. And then there’s the problem of attribution. If I click on an ad for a Tesla and then buy a Tesla, adtech will claim that the ad created and converted a sale. But, what is the likelihood anyone would buy a Tesla directly from clicking on an ad? Much more likely is that a person would have been contemplating such a purchase and saving up for it over a period of time. Attributing the sale to adtech is classic failure of logic, the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
So, in short, beware the easy seduction of adtech’s promises.
We lost our ambition and our focus
But what if directionally adtech was not totally wrong and it fell short mostly because of bad implementation?
That 89% of ads are forgotten owes in part to the fact that marketers got distracted by shiny toys and the promise of adtech. But it is also testament to something bigger. In marketing we lost our passion and became increasingly guilty of …. checking boxes.
We lost our desire to take risks. We accepted mediocrity and were content to look like every other company because we thought that this was a safe place to be.
But we also lost our ambition. The way that marketing is evolving, becoming more strategic and measurable, should have seen the function gain in importance within organizations. Instead, maybe because ‘traditional’ marketeers are not wired to focus on sales, marketing has gone backwards, excluded from conversations about pricing and product strategy, and reduced to just one of its 4 Ps: promotion. Marketing has become, as Mark Ritson might put it, a colouring-in department.
We see this especially in the B2B sector which is actually surprising considering the pressures that a lot of businesses are under… now more so than ever it seems. Although we wouldn’t underestimate the importance of communication, we do need to realize that at the end of the day sales are what makes an organisation tick. So, we argue, it is essential to have a strong marketing capability that knows how to optimize the levers of value creation and that understands that “luck” in sales is no more than preparation married to opportunity.
Precision marketing is not adtech
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s a thought experiment for you: What would happen if you could identify exactly the right buyer personas for a product or service, you understood who or what influences them and also their buying behaviours? What if you knew how to deliver authentic content specifically within the path of relevance for those buyers, their context and their motivations, reinforced through shared associations, and you could do this at the right time?
Would this level of effective marketing not generate sustainably higher quality opportunities with shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates? Would it not, furthermore, allow marketing to take a much greater role in sales execution?
Well, in our view this is not just possible, but we are building a platform to do it. We call it precision marketing.
Scaling the unscalable and doing the scalable better
Precision marketing doesn’t necessarily mean measurable marketing. The common denominator is an uncompromising quality standard that applies to everything from design to analytics. Nonetheless, precision marketing can be done at scale.
The team at aperture, through a mix of software and repeatable processes, has already made unscalable activities — such as the production of personalized, authentic content — scalable. And the scalable parts, such as paid social media, have been made more effective through better targeting — with great results.
My role, and the reason I have joined the aperture team, is to take this to the next level: to combine the scalability with a creative focus resulting in activities that not only increase the chances of closing deals, but also the value and volume of those deals. And then we plan to make this platform and approach viable for more industries — moving beyond financial services technology— and to transition it from B2B into high-end B2C (especially around artisanal goods).
Why now?
We believe there is a unique opening to do this now. The internet is not about technology, but about business models and distribution. While pure-play strategy consultancies are great at steering your product strategy and operations, we see a role to coordinate brand and distribution, business model, and sales generation in a way that is seamless and dramatically improves unit economics. What is more, the reach of strategy and marketing services goes further than ever before as technology solutions become increasingly best-of-breed and delivered as a service. Effectively, the B2B customer becomes more like B2C customer. And lastly, we believe we can capitalize on the structural trend to decentralized organizations to scale the business faster and with better people than has ever been possible in the past.
Curious?
aperture is not your usual organization. We work only with a few, great companies that we believe in. And we change the trajectory of these businesses by plugging them into our proven value creation loop at the same time as supplementing their teams with the best talent.
This is why I joined.
If you’d like to learn more about what we’re doing or to join our mission, please reach out.
