A Growth Marketer’s Peace offering to the Advertisers
I don’t know about you, but I have read quite a lot of articles lately proclaiming that we are at the end of a bullsh* era, that digital marketing is over, that targeting is a costly fraud and that data driven decision making is not the way forward.
Without going into detail about some of the irony of people using faulty data analysis and research methodology to prove points about the flaws about growth marketing, I must still note that it is quite amusing. However, going down the same kind of ridiculing and mockery route where I use rhetoric and anecdotal evidence to evoke emotions is not beneficial to any party at this point.
Where do these beliefs originate from?
The idea that data driven decision making is flawed comes from the legacy of the growth marketing industry’s evolution. When launched, companies like Amazon and Google were highlighted to have grown without traditional marketing efforts. They didn’t launch their products through TV-ads, radio commercials or beautiful outdoor and print art, but rather by using the opportunities made available by the Internet and more specifically they took advantage of people’s tendencies to prefer simplicity over complicating their lives.
This lead to a widespread discourse where words like A/B-testing, optimisation, automation and analytics grew in popularity. The idea promoted in most articles published by the IT-savy new marketing breed was that you could replace the “old way of working” with a new more scientifically correct way of working.
To top this of a trend bloomed around 2009 and was in full use by 2014 where marketers started implementing behavioural economics in their practices. But not in the way that the advertising industry had used their understanding of needs and emotions as a way to drive alignment in overall perception, belonging and identity with a brand. No. The digital tacticians (amongst I myself was a very loud proponent) argued that every communicative effort needed to drive some kind of activation.
And we (the tacticians) were very successful in winning the argument. The only problem was that it wasn’t our practices that made our tactics extremely successful, but it was rather the overall growth of online platforms that offered discounts to our tactical approaches. There were opportunities everywhere because people were adopting the new services and had an extreme curiosity which meant they clicked virtually everywhere without having to know where they would end up. (Throwing sheep, pushing our activities from candy crush and finding out what character in Harry Potter we were are just some examples of ridiculous things we did — just because we could.)
As an industry, we collectively used this overall growth to convince the world that digital marketing was awesome, that it was the targeting and the astonishing features of these tactical tools that were driving our success — whilst it was rather a causality/correlation problem that was going on. Meaning, we were not the cause of the effect even though we seemed as though we were causing it as a result of the correlating growth, which was rather a result of and overall growing market.
But since “the data” “proved” that we were doing a good job, it could be used to drive the belief that growth marketing/digital tactics was superior to traditional marketing and advertising.
Have a look at some other funny correlations here.
Just because the results look good, it doesn’t mean you’re doing a good job
An example: Once I worked with a car repair client. They also happened to sell vehicle tires. We launched a digital tactical campaign for winter tires in late October. No TV, no outdoor, no print and no radio.
In two days from the campaign launch the winter tire sales absolutely exploded. It was insane. The marketing director got high fives for a great campaign and we got blinks to us that more business was coming our way.
The only problem was that it wasn’t our campaign that was the cause of this tremendous sales increase. It was rather that we’d had a serious surprising fall of snow in Sweden that happened to coincide with our launch of the campaign.
And YES, the sales would probably not have ended up with our client if we wouldn’t have had the campaign that caught all of the snow-generated interest in winter tires. However, it was not the cause of the interest.
And this brings us to the root of the current problem.
Creatives AND Growth marketers
I don’t know what to call the thing that is not data driven. So let’s just call it being “creative” for simplicity reasons. (Although my belief is that creativity is at its peak when solving problems with limited resources or boundaries… but for simplicity’s sake.)
The overall idea that growth marketing would replace traditional advertising was flawed because of the causality errors that were made. The current trend is equally wrong, where people argue that data driven decisions, targeting and optimisation is a waste of resources and time.
We need both. And more importantly we need to be GREAT at both.
You cannot drive desire, dreams and tell stories that touch peoples feelings without appealing to their inner being. Creative people and the advertising industry has been incredibly good at doing this throughout time. I have met some people throughout my career that have this innate ability to turn thoughts into concepts that just make sense. People who create things that make you laugh, cry, get angry, feel love, get passionate and relate.
Those people are invaluable. They say things, write things and create things that feels.
At the same time you need to take care of the buzz you’ve created with your creative art in order to turn it from talk into business. For this purpose we can optimise the living sh* out of everything we do. And this is where growth marketers become invaluable. People who fight the data until it turns the 2nd derivatives of the trend graphs into the positives.
They should be 100% driven by data and find pockets of generated interest all over the Internet. And although they are completely unable to create the interest their job is to take over when the creatives have done their job to boost it. Or in other words, the growth marketers job is to generate measurable effect from the buzz that’s generated.
Creatives shouldn’t be data driven, maybe advised, but never optimised
Too many engineer thinking people (such as myself) believe that creatives should be data driven, but if I am truthful to myself, this idea is just wrong.
Too many engineer thinking people (such as myself) believe that creatives should be data driven, but if I am truthful to myself, this belief is just simply wrong.
To measure the work of a creative, find KPIs to guide them or to optimise their ideas is THE WORST IDEA IN THE WORLD. They should NEVER be data driven. They should be trusted and your gut should be your guide when you select the creative concepts that tell the story of your brand. These decisions should be based on feelings because the output of the decisions should invoke feelings.
Yes. You will fail a lot of times and you will not be able to relate to everyone. But if there is something that can be analogously applied to the process of creativity from the process of growth marketing, it is that you have to do many attempts to make it. Just look at Volvo and their Epic Split or Old Spice and their “Look at me”-guy. Look at Redbull and look at the growth of ALL influencers out there. None of them have made it with their first video attempt but they have continued on the same path until they found one creative idea that made everyone understand their whole concept. Which then propelled the desire for all of their content for the future. People went from feeling bothered into anticipating the next move.
This can not be done by optimising messages but you rather have to try to create new wonderful things (or get the help of your community to do so).
At best this process is optimised through its inputs. Making it “data advised” by producing good and well written briefs to the creatives who then get to create freely on top of these stories. Or… if I would invoke some kind of data driven process to the creative process I would split it into four steps:
- Doing research — Dayparting (find friction points), Jobs to be done (find social and emotional needs) and Trend analysis (to figure out what people dream about)
- Consumer life brief — A brief that focuses on explaining the customers life
- Story about consumer life — give the brief to a copywriter who writes a two page story about a day in the consumer’s life
- Brief to creative concept developer — Give the story and your company description to a creative concept developer who then gets to develop a concept on top of this — WITHOUT you poking your nose into it
The result will most likely feel uncomfortable for you, or at least create some kind of feeling inside. That comes from it being uncommon and if there is something I have learned through the years, it is that uncommon is the best thing when it comes to drive awareness about anything.
Awareness is the first step — FORBIDDEN from growth marketers
To understand how the two world’s fit together you can study the many canvases out there explaining growth marketing. The first step is ALWAYS generating awareness, the second is usually some kind of activation.
And that is how it should be.
The problem arises when a creative tries to do activation or when a growth marketer tries to drive awareness. Not because of their self belief that they can perform the task, but rather because they are simply not as good as an expert in either category. I believe (and think I have enough experience to prove it empirically as well if someone would be willing to pay me for such a study) that it requires two very different types of people to perform the two different tasks.
They think, feel and are incentivised by different kind of motivational structures and rewards. A creative is rewarded by beauty and how something feels. They might feel rewarded if they get a LION or a statue, but they couldn’t care less about the shape of the lines in Google Analytics or Facebook Insights.
The growth marketer on the other hand despises the statues whilst they buzz like a weight lifter on steroids whilst watching traffic movement through their analytics software of choice.
It is not about competitiveness nor pride. It is rather about the kind of fibre their being is made of.
Activation — is not for creative people
Which leads me to the second part of any conversion and growth cycle which I mentioned above. And that is the step of activation. I have never met a classic creative person from the advertising industry who has been able to create a digital concept that activates people.
They can make them feel, but since they don’t build the mechanics of each platform into their creative concepts (besides maybe the possibility to make a hashtag or buying an ad). They do not know how to combine them to make a difference and they have no idea of what to use when they want to make people do things.
For this job you need a digital tactician or a growth marketer. They have the ability to connect everything you need in order to make use of the built momentum to grow a business. Or in simpler words, turn interest into business.
And THIS is where targeting makes sense.
To make people buzz we can be quite general as feelings are shared. What motivates people to activate themselves however is very different and thus you need to meet every motivation with the right message to turn them from passives to actives.
To give you the clearest example of the difference. If you do not use targeting you will be Hillary. If you use targeting well, you will be Trump.
We need to stop beefing and start working alongside each other (BUT NOT TOGETHER)
We need to start moving. We need to understand that the two types of people need to work independently from each other but in teams with each other. We can eat lunch together and drink tea, but we should not influence each other’s work.
We need each other, but we should not impose ourselves on the other.
We need each other, but we should not impose ourselves on the other.
We are different breeds of people and in order to drive the most effective growth in the world we are both needed.
I can create effects and growth without great creatives and they can surely drive growth without me. I target the interest that exist, whilst they build desires that create the interest. Without each other we can be good. But together we can be great.
And that is what I want to say.
I know that my industry was terrible when conveying the story that we were about to replace ya’lls. But it is equally damaging when you are now trying to return the favour.
Let’s do this. Together. Let’s stop the real bullsh*, which is caused by our differences. Perhaps continue to tease each other publicly in the fight for budgets, but let’s never forget that you don’t want to do what I’m doing, and I don’t want to do what you’re doing. So, lets find a way to collaborate so that we could rather do what we love.
Cause true growth comes from being great at doing both.
