Marketing, Content, and The Danger of Safe Choices
At a conference in Chicago last year, I was sitting at our company exhibit booth during a time when almost all the attendees were in breakout sessions. I looked up and saw a very old man, alone in the nearly-empty hall, staring at our display from about twenty feet away. I watched him for a little while, wondering if he would come closer, then looked back down at my phone. After about five minutes I looked back up and saw him still standing in the same place. We made eye contact, and he shouted a single word at me across the gap:
“Marketing!”
I turned and looked at our display for a moment, then turned back towards him and shouted,
“Yes!”
Satisfied, he nodded and walked away.
We produce branded podcast series, and we don’t usually portray ourselves as a marketing firm, but he was exactly correct. “Marketing!” is exactly what we do. The media we produce are specifically designed to achieve the marketing and affinity-building goals of our clients.
And the people we work with really need that help, because of all the essential tasks of running a company, “Marketing!” is the hardest for many businesspeople to wrap their heads around. It’s an outlay of money for something that seems to have an uncertain and uncomfortably distant ROI. (“Yes, sales went up in the quarter after we launched the last marketing campaign, but are we absolutely certain that is why??”). It requires creativity, and that requires giving that money to people like artists and writers, who tend to make MBAs deeply uncomfortable. (“I mean, there’s a line item on here for concepts, for gosh sakes.”). And finally, even its objectives seem hard to define. (“Ask those agency people, and they’ll start throwing around terms like ‘affinity-building’.” What the heck does that even mean?)
This all might seem squirrely, subjective, and resistant to logic, but asked in the right way, all those questions have simple answers. Yes, it might be challenging (though not always impossible) to draw direct lines from particular marketing choices to specific sales, but the large-scale data are unambiguous: companies that do marketing well do well overall, and vice versa. Yes, we need to have some artists around if we want to do this properly, but the good ones are professionals, who really do understand and care about ROI, and who are bringing specific and hard-earned skills to bear on these problems.
Easiest to understand is the objective. Wipe away all the jargon and philosophy, and the function of all marketing can be summarized in three words:
“Look over here!”
No matter the form it takes—from a social campaign, to a run of magazine ads, to a publicity stunt, to a highway billboard—all marketing is an attempt to get people’s attention, to make them stop and turn and notice you rather than walking past. This is simple and clear, but not at all easy. There are an almost infinite number of ways you might try to grab someone’s attention, and most of them could easily fail. By looking at what has come before, though, we can find some universal truths about marketing success. One of them is this: grabbing attention requires a certain level of drama.
Imagine standing in a crowded hotel ballroom, full of hundreds of people all engaged in their own conversations. What would you have to do to get their attention? Standing in the corner quietly reading out your mission statement will not do the job. Nor will projecting stock photos on one of the walls. Try handing out fliers, and you should be prepared to sweep most of them up off the floor after everyone leaves. To redirect the eyeballs of a large and varied group, you have to do something equally large. You might yell, or pick up a microphone. You might flash lights or make noises or jump around or dance. You could pull the fire alarm. Whatever it is, it has to be more interesting than what people are already doing.
In any kind of marketing, insufficiently large gestures fade into the background and go unnoticed. To be successful, you have to do something that surprises, delights, shocks, charms, or intrigues. You have to make a splash. And so, I want to propose a new benchmark for successful marketing campaigns, which I will call:
MVF: Minimum Viable Flamboyance
This is the level of hullabaloo below which a marketing effort will have no impact at all, because it will attract no notice.
Achieving MVF is challenging, because it requires things that go far beyond professional competence. No matter how well-written, how professionally produced, and how aggressively distributed, marketing campaigns will fail if they are insufficiently weird. The thing that grabs people’s attention isn’t beauty or clarity, it’s novelty. You have to go out on a limb. This requires knowledge of the marketplace, creativity enough to dream up a head-turning idea, skill enough to smoothly execute that idea, sensitivity enough to know that picking up a microphone is a better idea than pulling the fire alarm, and the resources to execute on ideas once they are dreamed up. But perhaps more than any of those, what it requires is trust, which requires courage. You have to engage those creative professionals—artists and writers and strategists with a proven track record—and then get out of their way, giving them the space and resources they need to run with ideas that they believe will move the needle, even if those ideas seem strange or silly. Especially if they seem strange or silly, because those are more likely to be interesting.
Which brings us to the single greatest obstacle to achieving MVF… safety. “Playing it safe” is the death knell for successful marking. It means one of two things, both of which are fundamentally hostile to achieving MVF:
Doing things that are not controversial, because even mildly negative attention is deemed to be worse than no attention at all.
Doing things that are extremely similar to what others have done before, because that is a proven path.
At first glance, what could make more sense? “First do no harm” and “that worked for them, so we should do the same thing” both seem like pillars of wisdom. But both of these, by definition, result in work that will fail to reach MVF, instead recede into the background, unnoticed and quickly forgotten.
Think of the greatest marketing and advertising campaigns in history: Wendy’s forgoing sexy spokesmodels and instead opting for a frumping grandma screaming “Where’s the beef?”; Apple hiring Ridley Scott to direct an abstract Orwellian fantasy and then running it during the Super Bowl; Oscar Meyer sending a truck that looks like a giant hot dog on cross-country drives. All of them did something weird or outrageous or dramatic that was entirely unlike anything else going on. They took big swings and did something a little crazy.
In our work as purveyors of streams of content marketing, we are constantly fighting against the dangers of safety. There are three fundamental questions we ask at the beginning of a new project, each crucial to success: “how can we express the brand identity”, “what would the desired audience like to consume”, and “how can we make this different more interesting than the other media currently available on the same topic?” That third question is the one many clients push back on as unnecessary and beside the point, but it is actually the most important of the three: the bridge between content and content marketing, between success and failure.
The truth is that, in marketing, playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you can do, or at least the most hostile to ROI. A marketing campaign that doesn’t achieve MVF is a car without an engine. The case could be made that it is very “safe”. It will never get stolen, never get a speeding ticket, never break down on the side of the road. It will never get in an accident. It will also never, ever, take you where you need to go.