The death of creativity

I came across this quote from George Lois and it got me think­ing…”Cre­ativ­ity can solve almost any prob­lem. The cre­ative act, the defeat of habit by orig­i­nal­ity, over­comes every­thing.”

I’ve got a nag­ging feel­ing that mar­ket­ing automa­tion is giv­ing today’s mar­keters a num­ber of bad habits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly bought into the tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits of auto­mated plat­forms — com­mu­ni­cat­ing at the right time based on expressed and behav­ioural data, iden­ti­fy­ing qual­ity leads and rout­ing them appro­pri­ately to sales. And once the mar­keters have got to grips with the plat­form, they deliver greater effi­cien­cies, speed­ier exe­cu­tion, more con­trol and in-depth measurement.

But, at what cost?

When talk­ing to mar­keters, their approach to cre­at­ing a new cam­paign is often to repli­cate a pro­gram, swap out the header graph­ics and change the calls to action.  Really, is that what’s going to engage their tar­get audi­ence? Surely one lead gen­er­a­tion pro­gram can’t sim­ply be re-purposed. What about audi­ence insight and under­stand­ing? Who are they, where are they in the buy­ing cycle, what are their needs from your con­tent and what’s your unique propo­si­tion that’s going to excite them?

We need to get back to the fun­da­men­tals of defin­ing the cre­ative and busi­ness require­ments of a cam­paign. Only then do we develop cre­ative con­cepts that will sup­port these require­ments and deliver the best piece of mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion pos­si­ble, whilst at the same time defin­ing the opti­mal con­tact strat­egy for imple­men­ta­tion through mar­ket­ing automa­tion. It’s my belief that effec­tive cam­paign exe­cu­tion can only be realised through a com­bi­na­tion of left– and right-brain thinking.

So, if you find your auto­mated cam­paigns are deliv­er­ing less value for you over time, maybe it’s time to take a step back and breath some cre­ativ­ity back into your cam­paigns. You never know, it might just work…

Guaranteed leads. Publishers should try harder...

So here’s me think­ing that pub­lish­ers have really missed an oppor­tu­nity when it comes to pro­vid­ing guar­an­teed leads from their web properties.

Admit­tedly, whitepa­per pro­grammes work well when you’re try­ing to gen­er­ate a list of names. But, some­times that’s all they are – a list of names who are often unre­cep­tive when followed-up by tele­mar­ket­ing. Surely all of these “names” are active on the publisher’s web­site – they’ve been vis­it­ing, review­ing con­tent, con­tribut­ing in forums, etc. But all of this infor­ma­tion isn’t cap­tured when they fill-in a form and the data is passed on to the client.

Surely pub­lish­ers should be able to pro­vide some­thing that looks more like a lead than a name. Yes, they’ve reg­is­tered for a piece of high value con­tent, but there’s also so much more infor­ma­tion that can be appended to their pro­file e.g. how many times they’ve been on the web­site, areas of inter­est, lev­els of inter­ac­tion and con­tri­bu­tion, etc.

So, give me a score for each per­son that shows a com­bi­na­tion of “Pro­file Fit” and “Interest/Activity Fit”. And, as time is of the essence when hand­ing over leads (think of it as an atomic half-life of oppor­tu­nity), don’t give me a list of names once a week. Find out how to auto­mat­i­cally pass leads to our CRM sys­tem in near real-time. That’s why open APIs were invented.

In my hum­ble opin­ion, if pub­lish­ers can’t pro­vide this speed of ser­vice and level of infor­ma­tion, then guar­an­teed lead pro­grammes will become obsolete.