Here at Immortology Central we bang on some drums more than others, and one of our favorites is the idea that many marketers are too eager to embrace unproven communication tactics as mission critical panaceas for their marketing ills.

So a recent headline that said “FORRESTER: Facebook and Twitter Do Almost Nothing to Drive Sales” would, on its face, have us wagging our collective fingers at all the marketing sheoples who follow social media gurus and exclaiming, “TOLD YA SO!”

Fabulous news! The marketing research eminences at Forrester, surely some of the brightest minds in the land, have done research, and that research shows that Facebook and Twitter rank below every other online activity (direct visits, organic search, paid search, email, affiliates) in driving sales. Way below. Said they:

“Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers. While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in eCommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales for either new or repeat buyers.”

So there you have it. Run away. Likes and Followers don’t do you as a marketer any measurable good in driving sales.

BUT.

Running away from social would actually be following the same flawed logic that caused the stampede towards social in the first place.

Here’s why: Social Media is a tactic. Most social efforts by major marketers are being used just because they can be. Walmart, for Pete’s sake, has a Facebook page. You can follow any major brand on Twitter. But why? What is the reason behind the pages or the feed? Sin Tzu said “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”. Unless you have a solid business reason for collecting Likes or Followers there is no point in collecting them.

Sin Tzu also said “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory”. Solid strategies need solid tactics. Sometimes social media is precisely the right tactic. Let’s say your industry depends on thought leadership; therefore releasing product news to loyalists on Facebook before anywhere else makes sense. Or say yours is a local retail business dependent on floor traffic: Tweeting offers that are unavailable for anyone else to your loyal Followers can drive the floor traffic you need.

In many cases Facebook and Twitter and all the rest are exactly the right tools you need to get the marketing job done. Sometimes they’re not. You won’t know until you’ve crisply defined your strategy. Want to know more? Talk to us.

Bill Lee created a little bit of a firestorm in the small world of marketing blogging with a post on the HBR Blog Network last week with a provocative headline: “Marketing is Dead”.

Whoosh!  Lots of smoke and noise.  Hundreds of comments posted from true believers (“You tell em, Bill!!”) and crusty deniers (“Bollocks; Tisn’t!”)

We here at Immortology Central stroked our stubble thoughtfully and said “Hmmm”.

The truth from our perspective is quite reasonably somewhere in the middle.  Undoubtedly dead (as we all attended the funeral) is marketing the way we did it only 10 years ago.  A few TV spots, some well-crafted print, POS material and a website – all connected by a consistent look and feel – and we congratulated ourselves on creating a fully INTEGRATED campaign.  Remember those?

From a tactical POV, that type of marketing is indeed dead.  In a way.  It would be more accurate to say it has changed. Just like cars: they don’t make the 2002 BMW 3-Series anymore; but the 3-Series lives on in the 2012 models, and they are better than the old ones.

Where Mr. Lee’s argument falls down is the poo-pooing of traditional marketing tactics. There is still value in producing great POS, Collateral, Websites and Print.  Television is far from dead. In fact, according to a 2012 study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics “watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time (2.8 hours/day), accounting for about half of the leisure time for those 15 and over.” It is rarely used well, but when it is TV remains the best way to quickly engage the biggest and broadest array of people possible. And TV – not social media channels – is far and away the single biggest driver of brand conversations.*  Did Apple miss that opportunity when the New iPad was launched last year?  Certainly not.

What has changed is the endlessly growing array of on and off-line tactics, technologies and mash-ups to add to the traditional integrated mix of TV, Print, Radio and Outdoor. The smart marketer knows the right combinations of all these choices will best deliver the specific objectives their brands need. These tactics have hardly killed marketing – they’ve made it better – but unfortunately they often have yet to live up to the hype and realize their full potential.

Which leads to another, related, problem: the anti-traditional agendas espoused by pundits like Mr. Lee actually have hurt marketing.

By constantly touting the latest technology and tactics as the new Holy Grails for advertising, they’ve persuaded many naive marketers to abandon common sense and put all their marketing eggs into CRM and social media baskets with devastating results. Remember Pepsi’s “Refresh Everything” and  Best Buy’s “Twelpforce”? Don’t get me wrong, online Social Media tactics, technologies and platforms can help brands amplify their messages just as new forms of offline ambient media can. We use them all the time.

But here’s the bottom line: no tactic, technique, technology or channel is a substitute for a great brand positioning strategy executed with a meaningful, relevant and impossible-to-ignore idea.

The brilliant positioning strategy and big ideas are as rare as honest politicians these days.  And that, unfortunately, is what’s on life support – not marketing.

Agree with us and need this type of thinking for your business? Get in contact.  Disagree?  Post it and let’s discuss.

*May 14, 2012, Wall Street Journal, “Why Successful Branding Still Happens Offline”

It’s been my observation that most agencies these days – digital and traditional – are adding “Yes Men” to their ranks faster than Kim Kardashian goes through Louboutins. Last year it was Creative Technologists, this year it’s Ass Kissers. Case and point, there’s an agency CEO who ends every new biz pitch with this saccharin zinger, “Our number one goal is to be the best part of your day!” I know. Just writing it makes me want to vomit.

In some ways these legions of bootlickers are making a difference. The CMO Council surveys from the last few years show agencies are improving on customer service with better responsiveness and collaboration. The bad news is agencies continue to slip on the things that matter most like valuable strategic thinking, actionable customer insights, creative execution and measurement.

You won’t achieve these things when the only feedback you get from your agency is “Sure thing, boss!” What you will get is mediocre work, lackluster performance and an 18 – 24 month window before you need to find a new job and your agency needs to find a new pair of cheeks to kiss. The truth is great ideas are born through conflict and debate not kowtowing and groveling. A 2003 Berkeley study confirms it. Researchers found “that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” The hard numbers – debate and conflict not only produce better ideas, they produce 20% more of them. Here’s a link to a New Yorker article that covers everything you want to know about it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a “can do” attitude as long as it’s balanced by a healthy dose of “why do?” skepticism. What chafes me is the meteoric rise in sycophantic agency cultures that reward client brown-nosing at the expense of doing what’s right. What vexes me even more are the clients who demand it.

What about the customer always being right, you ask? The customer is always right. As the CEO, CMO or Brand Manager you might pay the bills but you’re not my customer. Your customers are.

At Immortology we put it this way. Good agencies work for their clients. Great agencies work for their clients’ customers. Ditto for great clients. When agency and client are aligned with fulfilling the end customers’ wants and needs, great things happen. Look no further than Nike, Apple, Southwest and Starbucks. I guarantee their agencies aren’t filled with “Yes Men”. If yours is, my advice is to fire them now and hire a group that has the balls to tell you when you’re parading around naked.

Mike Elgan at houzz wrote this interesting article on the future of TV. The article talks about the convergence of TV and phone. Is the world really ready to be a stage? The article is good, but the conversation is even better.

What do you think?

Read the article here.

- Rhys

I’m jealous.

Two weeks ago, my friend Tommy Lee Edwards and his family came over for a cookout. Tommy is a renowned Marvel and Lucasfilm illustrator who lives in nearby Pittsboro, NC. Through his work on classic comics like Batman, Hellboy and Daredevil and an original creation, Turf, with British talk show host Jonathan Ross, he’s attracted a huge following in the US and Europe.

His following is about to get a lot bigger.

After dinner, he showed me the beta site of a new project he’s working on with Edgar Wright, co-writer and director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It’s called The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator  and it just may be the perfect mix of animation, short film, product demo and interactive, crowdsourced storytelling ever created.

The idea is this.

Brandon is a moody writer suffering from a bad case of writers block. After falling into a caffeine-infused coma, he awakens to find his Dictaphone, PC and notebooks filled with messages, prose and ideas he doesn’t remember creating. Where did all these ideas come from? From you, of course. Visitors to the site are invited to help Brandon finish his story by submitting illustrated characters, storylines and voice messages to a gallery on the web. The best ideas will be incorporated right into each episode – moving the story forward in the most unpredictable and entertaining ways.

The audience, in essence, becomes a surrogate for Brandon’s broken creative mind. Participants become an uncontrollable font of ideas that quite literally take over Brandon’s life and threaten his identity. This Twilight Zoney-Noir interactive experience is not only an entertaining ride, it’s a great vehicle to demonstrate Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 and what it can do for HTML5.

Kudos to Tommy and Edgar executing the hell out of this idea and to Microsoft and 3 Monkeys for letting them do it the right way. Check it out - The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator.

Wish we had this guy on staff. He’s the triple-threat: Talented, fast and cheap!

Drawing well has become a lost art in our profession. This video is a great reminder that the almighty computer isn’t the answer to it all and a few well placed strokes on the page can convey a big story. Congratulations to those of you who can still sell a concept off a napkin!

http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/50969950

I recently participated in a group discussion hosted by the CMO Network on LinkedIn. The topic was “What is your opinion on “execution trumps strategy”…do you agree?”  Here was my response:

People don’t buy strategies.

They don’t purchase Apple, Nike and Southwest because these companies have insightful creative briefs and brilliant strategic plans (which they all do). But strategy is nothing more than a promise. People don’t buy promises without a guarantee. (Not for long, anyway.)

The guarantee for a brand promise is execution. Apple, Nike and Southwest all demonstrably validate their promises not through what they say but by what they do.

And what they do – and do extremely well – is perpetually adapt and innovate to serve their customers needs better than anyone else. These brands have discovered their higher purposes: Nike’s is helping people unleash their inner athletes, Apple’s is helping people express themselves through intuitively and beautifully designed technology and Southwest’s is helping people fly more and better by democratizing air travel.

By committing to fulfill their higher purposes at all costs, these brands have hit upon the Holy Grail of communications. Their strategy and promise (higher purpose) are inextricably linked to their actions (execution).

So the question of whether “execution trumps strategy” or not is irrelevant. Strategy without execution is a hollow promise. Execution without strategy is a guarantee without purpose. True success cannot be achieved without both. Period.

What do you think?

As Immortologists we believe in the eternal life of brands. We’re not alone. In Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long and Prosper, authors Hamish Pringle and Peter Field, draw upon 880+ case studies to make a strong argument that “Properly managed, no brand need decay and die — immortality is within the reach of all…”

In fact, brands don’t die of natural causes; they’re murdered. Usually by the ones who care for them most.

When people kill people we call it homicide. When people kill brands, it’s called brandicide. The marketing graveyard is filled with millions of brands whose lives were cut short by brandicidal managers and owners. It’s a root cause of Economic Darwinism where brands that fail to evolve and adapt disappear.

For example, digital cameras didn’t kill Kodak. Kodak’s management team did. In fact, Kodak invented the first digital camera back in 1975.  But instead of marketing the new technology, they suppressed it because they feared it would hurt their film business.

Beyond Kodak, we’ve witnessed the untimely demise of seemingly invincible brands like Circuit City, Gourmet Magazine, Borders Books, Tower Records, Pontiac, Saturn and Palm among others. Meanwhile, business prognosticators predict the trend will continue. Each year 24/7 Wall St. predicts which brands will give up the ghost by the end of the year. Their 2012 kick the bucket list includes brands like Nokia, Saab, Sears and Kellogg’s Corn Pops. None of these picks are super surprising given that all of them are great examples of brands whose owners and managers have been unwilling to help them adapt and evolve to meet their markets’ ever-changing needs.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, 24/7 Wall St. also wrote an article entitled Six Brands That Have Come Back From the Dead. In it, they tell the stories of six brands that were resurrected from near death experiences. All of the brands mentioned – Lego, Apple, Marvel, Old Spice, Nintendo and Volkswagen – were all “the market leaders, or at least brands with very large sales, in their sectors before their revenue declined.” They are also all great examples of how smart managers not only allowed but forced their brands and companies to make lifesaving changes.

My friend Jeremy Holden touches on a few examples of healthy changes brands have made to battle mid-life declines in his post Prospering After Your Brand’s “Mid-Life Crisis”. He illustrates how “game-changing” brands like Southwest, Starbucks and Apple have weathered mid-life crises by making healthy changes to better serve their customers. He also finishes with some sage advice on how to not only survive the inevitable bumps those changes bring but to build a stronger, more prosperous brand in the process.

The point is brands don’t have to die. In fact, there are things you can do right now to ensure your brand will be eternally relevant and prosperous. Unlike mortal brands, immortal ones adhere to a tried and true process to become so. What’s more this process can be implemented at any stage in a brand’s lifecycle to ensure eternal health and vitality. Not following it – no step can be skipped – will result in eventual decline and ultimately death. In other words, if you don’t do everything you can to follow these steps you could be guilty of brandicide. To avoid that unnecessary tragedy, click on the link receive our email series Eight Steps To Brand Immortality. 

After an exhaustive search an agency that will remain nameless selected me to be their Executive Creative Director.  I was told the primary reason they wanted to hire me was my “impressive track record of creating Big Ideas”. Undeterred by some initial reservations, I took the job and got right to work.

In less than six months, the ideas coming out of the agency became noticeably better.  Clients were thrilled, the creative department was re-energized and there was a general good buzz around the agency.  Despite all this success, my methodology of presenting only one idea to clients became an issue.  During our weekly leadership meeting, the CEO asked me to explain how I was able to determine which idea out of multiple ideas was the best one.

I thought for a moment and answered her with this question. “Out of all the men out there, how did you know your husband was the one?”

“I just knew,” she replied.

“Ahh,” I said, “It’s the same with Big Ideas. I just know.”

My fuzzy-wuzzy creative director answer wasn’t the one her Spock-like brain was looking for.

“Well that’s great for you,” she said, “but we (meaning herself and the other Vulcans on the agency’s leadership team) need a tool to help us recognize Big Ideas too. I want you to create a Big Idea Recognition Tool for us.”

Notwithstanding the ridiculousness of her request, I agreed to give her a Big Idea Recognition Tool.

“Meet me in my office at 3 tomorrow and I’ll present it to you,” I said.

The next day she marched into my office like a German commuter train – right on time. With my back to her, I waited a couple of seconds for dramatic effect and then suddenly spun around.

“How do you do,” I said reaching out to shake her hand. And then, with impeccable timing, I delivered the obvious punch line. “I’m your Big Idea Recognition Tool.”

Even though I made my point and the creative department loved it, I’m not really proud of how I handled the situation.  As the ECD I had every right to assert my authority as the ultimate curator of the agency’s ideas, I just didn’t go about it the right way. If someone wants to know how an agency’s best ideas are selected, “I just know” doesn’t cut it.  The truth is, my answer and antics were pretty arrogant. They made me look more like a tool than a Big idea Recognition Tool.

Since then, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what really makes an idea a Big Idea. How Immortology determines whether an idea is a big one or not is much more than a hunch or a feeling.  It’s a 20-point checklist.

You just might have yourself a Big Idea if:

1. It still feels like a big idea 24 hours later.
2. Your customers will find it impossible to ignore.
3. There’s little chance it will be forgotten.

If you’re interested in the other 17, click here and I’ll be happy to send you Immortology’s Big Idea Checklist.

After careful consideration, we’ve come to the radical conclusion that everything wrong with advertising today (and business for that matter) stems from one root cause. That’s right, there’s one big, giant problem that has given birth to the snake pit of issues the industry faces. The upside is, solving this one problem will go a hell of a long way to solving just about all of them. But, before telling you what the mother of all problems is, let’s first dispose the usual suspects.

The Recession