For as long as I’ve been doing this, people have been telling me that the surest path to marketing success was to always be “fishing where the fish are.” That is, put your message where the people you want to reach, are.
And that makes sense, right? If you’re talking to motorcycle riders, advertise where motorcycle riders are. If you’re talking to Moms, put your message where Moms are. And if you’re talking to Moms who ride motorcycles, well, you get the idea.
And this advice has served advertisers and their agencies for centuries. I would bet that if you dug deep enough into Pompeii’s ashes you would find an ancient Roman vellum purporting delivering this aphorism in some Latinate version of corkscrew advertising-ese.
Read MoreAsk a B2B shop about their B2C cousins and invariably you will hear something like this: “B2C agencies are a bunch of undisciplined, overpriced children who should stay away from the serious business of B2B marketing and leave it to the adults before they do some real damage.”
Ask a consumer agency a similar question and they’ll invariably reply: “B2B shops should keep their second-rate versions of ideas that they stole from outdated back issues of B2C awards annuals and leave the creativity to the real agencies – the ones who do the consumer marketing that those B2B shops only wish they could still do.”
Read MoreWe all know what an art director does, right? They make the pictures - and in a society that is as visually obsessed as ours is, that’s clearly a pretty important job.
And we all know what copywriters do too, right? They come up with the words that no one reads except the lawyers and the brand managers.
But creative directors? They don’t write – though they may have once. They don’t design, though they may have once. And they sure as hell don’t code. So just exactly what do they do, and more importantly, why the hell are you paying them?
What they do - and what you are actually paying them to do whether you realize it or not – is to be the bridge between the problem you have and the solution you pray people you don’t understand will come up with.
Read MoreYou remember demand generation, right? Born in that first mythical golden advertising age, when Claude C. Hopkins and Albert Lasker strode the earth, demand generation emerged when clients had products found themselves saddled with unsellable products. Products that they brought to agencies, saying, “I don’t know what to do with this. You think you can come up with a reason for humans to buy it?”
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