#128 The marketing throwback

Happy Sunday, everyone.

Prefer to listen to this week’s issue? Go here: The marketing throwback

As third-party data becomes less reliable, I hear a lot of people talking about how much harder it will be to effectively market and communicate to customers.

To be honest, I’m kinda glad this is happening.

Part of this is due to my bias as a “creative” person. It seems these days, businesses sacrifice too much of themselves in the name of being “data-driven” and forget how much their brand marketing matters. It’s not uncommon to see the investment of performance efforts outweigh brand efforts by 3:1. What if we flipped it?

These recent thoughts have me itching to run an experiment where we develop and implement a marketing campaign solely on a few customer interviews, intuition, and guts. One time, let’s not get bogged down by multi-funnel automation, omnichannel optimization, and AI personalization.

Does this mean throwing out ROI? Not at all. But what if we looked at it holistically.

Maybe it’s mentally putting ourselves back in the madmen era, without the internet, and relying on fewer ones and zeros.

Why? Because a lot of marketing right now feels mailed-in. Boring. Let’s just look at the data and play it safe. If it doesn’t work, it’s not our fault, we followed the data. Ugh! Marketing is focused on being efficient without being effective.

I’d love to see what comes out of an exercise like this. My guess (and hope) is the ideas would be more innovative, the design and copy more attention-grabbing, and the results more formidable.

Regardless, I believe moving in this direction would get us to think more, push harder, and ship ideas that scare us.

Who knows, maybe it won’t work. But what if it does?

One to Ponder

• Asking for feedback creates a critic. Asking for advice creates a partnership. - Shane Parrish

One to Try

• How fun is this? It’s a radio time machine with the top songs from any decade in any country: Radiooooo

One to Watch

• The world is a wonderful place: 15 Unbelievable places that actually exist
  

Until next time, friends.

-David