Marketers: Be less cat

Don’t let bright, shiny things distract you from your immutable purpose

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

Advertising is dead, long live content marketing! Which is now sadly deceased, so long live influencer marketing! (which is being killed by AI creative marketing bots, or was that AR?). Yada, yada ya.

Bottom line: something is dead, or everything is changing — and, super conveniently, you’ve got the new, best solution to the (un)timely demise of said other thing.

The marketing industry is often guilty of this kind of worst hype. As Bob Hoffman, author of blog Ad Contrarian, sums it up nicely: “nobody ever got famous predicting that things would pretty much stay the same.”

But some things do stay the same though. The important stuff.

The marketing industry has gone through a significant period of transformation with the rise of the internet and mobile, and all that entails. It has given birth to innumerable new categories and sub-categories of disciplines, solutions and services (with seemingly ever decreasing royal life spans…). But the accompanying hype has only served to elevate the means of execution and channel in terms of programme development. And that’s ingrained the wrong sort of behaviours and thinking.

20 years ago I remember being asked in every client meeting, ‘what’s our viral strategy?’. Replace the word ‘viral’ with video, content, influencer, social, or indeed any other contemporary buzzword, and I’d still give you the same response: you don’t need an x channel strategy, you need a strategy. Full stop. Period. And everything flows from there. That has and never will change, even as the mix of channels at our disposal continues to grow and morph.

And anyway, many of the distinctions we obsess about as marketers are meaningless. Think about a Facebook post with an image and some sharp text. Advert? Content marketing? Social activation? Who cares if it’s the most effective way to engage an audience.

Part of problem lies with how brands have traditionally managed their spend. Budget is often pre-allocated on a per annum per channel / discipline basis, which incentivises roster agencies to sell aligned ideas and services. Here’s your creative (for a 30 second TV spot). Here’s your big idea (for a PR stunt).

But consumers don’t think or react that way. Have you ever said to a friend, wow, I just had another amazing DM piece from brand x? Or, I feel brand x really delivers engaging digital activations? No, me neither.

We (as consumers) consider the whole experience we have of a brand across all channels and touch points, and form our opinions (and behaviours) accordingly. That should be a starting point for developing our marketing programmes…not having to reverse engineer disparate discipline or channel approaches to try and synthesise some degree of coherence and retrospectively justify spend.

Unilever has recently adopted a zero-based approach to budgeting. Albeit primarily as a cost control exercise, it nonetheless forces brands to justify their spend across disciplines and channels every year. And that’s a good thing if it dissolves ossified practices.

So coming back to where I began, what are the important, immutable truths? Well, here’s the ones I’ve always held to:

• Know your audience. Intimately.
• Strategy defines the why and how you need to change behaviours in order to achieve your goal.
• Creative ideas are solutions to the strategy, in part or in whole.
• Ideation should never be limited or biased — be media, channel and discipline agnostic.
• There is no ‘offline’ or ‘online’, digital or social marketing. There is only marketing.
• Be fluid, not fixed. Challenge, iterate, refine.

But my key thrust is this: marketing has not and will never be a zero-sum game.

The best agencies have always understood it’s most important to be adaptive and dynamic in creatively solving client problems — even if that means partnering to exploit the possibilities of channels and disciplines beyond their core competencies. Their approach remains consistent, even as they embrace the new in marketing.

And whilst clients will continue to hire agencies for a specific skill set or expertise, they need to set their thinking free. Execution can be managed in swim lanes, if necessary, but strategy and ideas shouldn’t. Everyone needs open minds. Client and agency. That’s where the best campaigns are imagined.

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