Why That Campaign You Love Is Ruining Your Business...
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives are mimicry, their passions a quotation.” – Oscar Wilde
“If you invented the Facebook, why didn’t you just invent the Facebook?” – Zuck (maybe)
“Different, not better.” – Al RamadanIt’s almost Halloween which means it’s just about time for Will Arnett to tell us he’s not sorry for stuff people do to peanut butter cups.
It’s also almost time for marketers to start asking themselves: Hey, what’s our ‘Not Sorry’ campaign?. The thinking being, Reese’s sold loads of candy thanks to that campaign, and we’d like to sell loads of our stuff too. Plus, it’s so clever and different and did you see they won that award from that thing we all went to? Man, so good.
And here’s what they do about that.
They have a meeting!
And invite everybody!
All the marketing people. The insights people. The sales people. The agency people. All of the people.
And have all those people spend time making stuff to share with all the other people so that the meeting will be a success.
But, at the very start of that meeting, you know that they’ll do? They’ll say, hey, lots of familiar faces here today and a few new ones too. And then, they’ll strike fear into the hearts of every single person there by adding, let’s go around the room and talk about a campaign that really inspired us.
Oh man, we’ll think, I should have anticipated that! And then, in a fit of panic when it’s our turn, we’ll say you know, I really like that ‘Not Sorry’ campaign from Reese’s.
And everybody will nod their head and then we’ll play a video of the commercial just to confirm how kick ass it is. And if we’re lucky, a bespectacled fellow in the back will ask us to play it again, so he can really get the nuances of it all. And we’ll nod our heads that yes, that is a good idea because we’re all thoughtful people!
Then the meeting finishes and all the people go to work. Trying to come up with something interesting. Different. Novel.
Stuff that will actually break through.
And then they’ll present back to the people in charge who will say something like: I really like it, but what’s our “Not Sorry” campaign?
Or wow, that’s really bold stuff, but you know our conservative culture won’t go for it; what about something like that Reese’s ad with Will Arnett?
Maybe even an astute young brand manager will chime in with, What kind of data do you have on this; how do we know it will be a success, who else has done this?
And that’s really the saddest feedback of all.
When the benchmark of a good idea is whether that idea was successful for someone else in the past. Or when an idea is rejected because it is too unlike what others have done in the past.
In a world where a billion things compete for the (relative) same amount of human attention, you can’t count on forcing a message into a brain. You have to get people to stop and say well, that’s something new, I never thought of it like that.
The dynamic, however, is set up in a way where we reward repetition. Where we embrace track records and precedence.
The irony, of course, is that what really captures attention is the unprecedented.
So, maybe instead of starting off our meetings by frantically trying to think of a campaign that really moved us, we should start those meetings by asking people to (frantically) share something they’ve never seen before. I’ve never seen a brand __________ before. And maybe that’s a better marker of merit when we present work to each other after it's all done.