So many times in an advertising career, the new new thing is requested or suggested and we… acquiescesce because it’s cool or we want to be cool or it’s just easier. And then it becomes a game of who can fire, ready, aim fastest. David Kottkamp a legend at Nike for his level-headed composure once told me to take time away from work to gain perspective. As counselors to brands, one of the things that clients don’t often know they’re asking of us, is to provide just that perspective. It’s not easy but it leads to better experiences for our brands customers’, which means better brand perception, if we put customer needs before the bright shiny advertising fad.
Bill Bernbach once said, “Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before.” With new technologies and techniques arriving every day, it’s often easier to focus on the latter half of the quote than the first. And that is a case of the emperor’s new clothes rather than a valuable partnership with a client or a commitment to customer-centric marketing. Just to be clear, I have been guilty of the “new technology looking for a client to test it on” syndrome because I fell in love with the shiny object. My goal now is to invert the equation and ask first, what of substance can I help my clients offer a customer before I consider how I’m going to offer it. (This of course means, I better have a pretty darn good idea about those customers and their lives and what the value.)The what before the how seems like a no-brainer but it’s easy to forget on the road to awards.
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"Another @WalmartLabs program helps optimize and dynamically assemble 15 million creative units a day to retarget people who visit its website." This from an article in Ad Age today about Brian Monahan, VP of Marketing at Walmart.com. I get efficiency but Walmart in this case seems to be confusing eff words. Efficiency does not equal effectiveness when dealing with humans.
First, I so hardly think that what is being describe here are "creative" executions except in the "10,000 monkeys with typewriters in a room could write War and Peace if given enough time". Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. Second, I do believe this is why most people, not machines feel like the character in character in Clockwork Orange forced to watch violent images: emotional and thus reactive blindness to all other display ads. The job of marketing is create connection between people and brands; this is an alchemy of emotion and information. Call it a teaching moment not a pure data moment (that happens between machines not living sentient beings) because people need to know why they should care. At it’s best, its an act of storytelling that inspires. |