a curious perspective

I just felt like, I didn’t give enough of the heart of what’s going on here. That was my three-in-the-morning thing. And tomorrow morning at three o’clock, I will think of something else.

But if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to hold back the develop of interesting, provocative, distinctive work, it’s the fear that it will ‘alienate’ a brand’s existing consumers.

Views and interactions on their own are but an indication that people came into contact with our content. Yet the way some people speak, you’d think that audience contact was the endgame. Not merely the beginning of something…

We need to get our heads round the fact that the real battle is not for loyalty but scale. And in that battle being mentally available - known, famous, salient, top-of mind - and physically available - findable, recognizable, and accessible - are marketing’s key levers for success.

Customer acquisition should be the primary objective for brands. Our ultimate audience therefore consists of people who are not devoted zealots, who do not think about us all the time, and who don’t have an exclusive relationship with us. If we focused a little more on how brands actually grow, we might be a little more careful about throwing around that ‘engagement’ word.

It’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

Fetishising insights treats them as a thing, rather than a process, a way of looking and thinking about problems. It encourages us to get our knickers into a twist debating whether something is ‘merely’ an observation or a piece of information or whether it is a bone fide Insight. The fact that the majority of men’s bodywash is actually bought by women, not men would fail to fulfill the insistence that it evoke an exclamation of “ah ha!” There’s no profound wisdom here. There’s no deep psychological revelation. Yet this understanding has undoubtedly helped unlock growth.

The rhetoric of participation rather obscures the fact that one of the most fundamental (and overlooked) roles of brands is to help people NOT think very much about their purchase decisions.

There is a prevalent myth (at least in some quarters) that strategy defines the What of advertising - What are we trying to do? What do we want to say? - and that creativity defines the How. To my mind, this fights human nature. It fights the nature of advertising. And it gets in the way of creating really good advertising.

Much of marketingland still labours under the quaint illusion that we’re in business of transmitting of information, and that advertising works through ‘communicating’ ‘messages’. As if we’re surgically inserting something into people’s brains.

Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use… Oh, the strangers came today, and it looks as though they’re here to stay.

Data doesn’t tell you what to do, insight does, and insight is the responsibility of the innovator, not the audience.

Refusing to embrace radicalism means to refuse ideas.

The stuff on television is called programming for a reason

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

After all, if it isn’t blogged, Facebooked or tweeted, then it didn’t happen.