Make Marketing Amateur.

"To me, an amateur photographer is one who is in love with taking pictures, a free soul who can photograph what he likes and who likes what he photographs."

Erwin Blumenfeld (Popular Photography 1948)

Media Neutrality.

"That camera doesn't know if it's a film camera or a TV camera or a streaming camera. It's just a camera."

Kevin Spacey (Edinburgh TV Festival 2013)

Marketing Communication 101: Words.

Words can tell your potential customers a lot about the real you. Or, they can show that you're more interested in yourself than in them.

 

They can reveal that you're more interested in creating clever advertising than something they might read.

Or words can show your potential customers that you're interested in helping them achieve their goals.

Choose wisely.

Make Marketing Obvious.

B&Q's unloved room is a great example of a genuine insight. Something that resonates with all of us, something that was unseen in plain sight and something that B&Q can directly address. My one concern would be whether or not B&Q has tied the insight exclusively to them as opposed to just encouraging people to renovate their unloved room.

The absence of in-store design consultations and personalised product packages seems like a missed trick to me, but maybe such integrated marketing is in the pipeline. Given how keen marketing people are on "ownership",  it's surprisng how often they fail to follow through on the idea.

 The campaign also got me thinking about another unloved room - the garage. Specifically, the tendency of people to use theirs as store-rooms for unloved stuff at the expense of leaving their expensive automotive asset parked on the driveway or in the street.

This sort of actual behaviour is exactly what companies and agencies should be looking out for and acting upon. A joint-promotion between storage businesses and insurance companies would be an obvious option and one that would benefit both industries and simultaneously position them as problem-solvers in the minds of customers.

Reminding people that there are cheaper places to store their stuff and that garages are designed to protect cars from weather, damage and theft is marketing communication made easy because you're preaching to the lapsed believer rather than trying to convert the indifferent.

There will be many such examples out there, but I'm not sure enough of us are looking for them.

Responsive Marketing Not Always Responsive.

Too many people are getting over-excited about responsive content. Oreo did it very well during the Superbowl though, as I've asserted before, they got lucky with the power outtage, but now every time a topical ad appears, people start claiming that it's all down to social media.

No it's not. This sort of thing has always happened. Social media just allows it to be published quicker. It's not really responsive, it's anticipated. Nothing wrong with that, but if you think Adidas's work above was not pre-prepared, I'd suggest you take a look at the aftermath of his victory and note when he was wearing a cap, when he threw away the racquet and then the sweatbands.

Tea-Time Marketing.

My friend Amanda tweeted this picture the other day. A cafe that lets you know how long your tea has been brewing.

A business that shows its customers that it knows what's important to them and thaat they really think about quality control.

As ever, you see somethign like this and wonder why everybody doesn't do it.

Discovering Things Is Clumsy And Sporadic.

I was just listening to a radio show about Brian Eno's famous oblique strategy cards. The narrator was unable to contact the man himself and read out a quote (somewhat out of context in my opinion) that indicated it would be a fool's errand. Feeling oblique, I googled it, found the post and then saw it included this bulletin board response from "last century".  It rather puts all that innovation agency nonsense to shame doesn't it?

"I'm afraid to say that admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism, for consolidation. Of course it's really wonderful to be acclaimed for things you've done - in fact it's the only serious reward, because it makes you think "it worked! I'm not isolated!" or something like that, and it makes you feel gratefully connected to your own culture. But on the other hand, there's a tremendously strong pressure to repeat yourself, to do more of that thing we all liked so much. I can't do that - I don't have the enthusiasm to push through projects that seem familiar to me ( - this isn't so much a question of artistic nobility or high ideals: I just get too bloody bored), but at the same time I do feel guilt for 'deserting my audience' by not doing the things they apparently wanted. I'd rather not feel this guilt, actually, so I avoid finding out about situations that could cause it.

The problem is that people nearly always prefer what I was doing a few years earlier - this has always been true. The other problem is that so, often, do I! Discovering things is clumsy and sporadic, and the results don't at first compare well with the glossy and lauded works of the past. You have to keep reminding yourself that they went through that as well, otherwise they become frighteningly accomplished. That's another problem with being made to think about your own past - you forget its genesis and start to feel useless awe toward syour earlier self "How did I do it? Wherever did these ideas come from?". Now, the workaday everyday now, always looks relatively less glamorous than the rose-tinted then (except for those magic hours when your finger is right on the pulse, and those times only happen when you've abandoned the lifeline of your own history)."