A Living Death

George A. Romero was an early contributor to the genre with his 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No, this post isn't about the Zombie Apocalypse, although that'd get a lot of page views. Its about yet another pundit suggesting something is dead. That too gets page views. Death, vampires, and celebrities. Dead celebrity vampires are especially good for page views. But I digress.

No, this post is about a recent speech to the IoD given by Saatchi and Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts who boisterously proclaimed (as ad people are fond of doing) the following things as dead:

Marketing.
Value Statements.
Strategy.
The 'Big Idea'.

Suddenly I'm not feeling too good myself.

In fact, these things are not dead, they are merely changing. I'd use a caterpillar/butterfly analogy here but I fear metaphors may be dead too.

Marketing used to be about positioning, segmentation, and anticipating customer needs. Roberts says that approach is dead because change is too rapid today. Essentially, he says, think too long about it and 'poof!' its different and you're on the wrong track.

That's not death, that's just an acknowledgement of the importance of agility. Marketing requires greater agility than ever before. It means marketers have to listen more than ever before.

Value statements are dead and dreams are in. Dreams are in all right, dreams in the form of stories that register with customers. That's not death, that's an ability to convey moods, emotions, and to create relevance for your brand among customers. Tell a story, don't recite a fact... build a relationship, not a transaction.

Strategy involves too much consideration in a hyper world. Take an action, any action. Strategy is death. Still, if you don't have a destination in mind, to paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, any road will get you there. Strategy isn't dead. Analysis paralysis is dead.

Big ideas are dead, small ideas are where the excitement is. A series of ideas appealing to segments to build relationships that taken together add up to that one... big... idea. Dead? No. Chopped into little pieces to create something new? Very much alive.

Marketing isn't dead. It's just that the margins for error are slimmer. So the decisions we make now as marketers just appear more, well, life or death. 

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Using context in creative

In marketing, we are all too often too quick to shrug and allow 'sufficient' or 'passable' creative because, after all, of the subjective nature of of clients' and creatives' judgements.

Yet the most effective messaging is rarely about the message only, the clever headline only, or the graphics only. It is more broadly all those things, always as they are used within a specific context. Delivering the unexpected means communicating the unexpected, in an unexpected way, in an unexpected place. Saatchi and Saatchi got it right with this ad for flea and tick spray:



Look carefully. This is an enormous advert on the floor of a transporation hub in Indonesia. The 'fleas' are passers-by, many unaware of their role in the ad itself.

Large format floor ads have been done before, but this one is the first I have seen that combines the impressive graphic impact of large-scale installations in an unexpected way, in this case where passers-by are integral to the message. Without them, the image is incomplete. Place this same image on a postcard or in a trade advertisement, it communicates the same message, but offers no interaction, no imact, and builds no affinity for the brand.

"Art" remains subjective, but "context" is objective. Recognizing this makes good creative easier to recognize, easier to sell, and builds credibility for marketing and advertising as measureable and accountable. As ad legend David Ogilvy is quoted as saying, “If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.”