Many years ago I used to run graduate recruitment for an ad agency. As a warm up exercise on recruitment day, I asked each of the participants to write on the flipchart the name of the last newspaper or magazine they bought, and why they bought it. One by one, up they got. “Cosmo – […]
Your proposition is the single-sentence answer to the question: “Give me one good reason why I should buy your product”. Remember, you’re only allowed ONE reason. It’s the elevator speech for someone only going up one floor. That single sentence ideally should have only ONE verb and ONE adjective. Finding that one good reason is deceptively difficult. […]
It’s over 21 years since the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers published a report that claimed that “Payment By Results will form 75 per cent of advertising agency contracts within five years”. https://www.marketingweek.com/payment-by-results-is-on-the-way-says-isba/ Two decades later, and the forecast rush to payment-by-results doesn’t seem to have materialised. Having worked on both client and agency sides, the […]
In Professor Byron sharp’s recent piece in Campaign (“Why the best response to Covid-19 was to stop advertising”) the Prof rails against the endless hand-wringingly earnest advertising many big brands put out in the wake of Covid. In the article he is quoted as saying that it is “embarrassing arrogance” that marketers would think people were […]
At one point in his life, Sam Walton – the founder of Walmart – was the richest man in America. Once a week, every single week, even at the height of his wealth, Sam would travel to a random store in the chain, and spend the morning working on the tills. This wasn’t so he […]
Many years back – goodness me, it was almost in the last century – I was a Senior Account Director at a long-gone London integrated advertising agency. For my sins, I was put in charge of annual graduate account management recruitment. Each year a new crop of prospective Frank Lowes* would turn up for our […]
In recent times, CMOs (under pressure from their CFOs and CEOs) have increasingly – wrongly – shifted focus and budget away from long-term brand building, and towards short term growth through sales activation. In part this is because the impact of sales activation is easier to measure (e.g. PPC rates), increasing pressure for MQL volumes […]
Last year Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo at the LinkedIn B2B institute published their excellent “2030 – B2B Trends” report. Not every B2B marketer will have the time to work through every argument and nugget in the report’s 43 pages which is a shame as it’s closely packed with good advice. So with due deference to […]
Over the past few days I’ve been publishing my precis of the excellent LinkedIn B2B 2030 Trends white paper from Peter Weinberg & Jon Lombardo. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here (A Refocus on B2B Brand as a Long Term Sales Driver | LinkedIn) and here (Blockbusbuster B2B Marketing | LinkedIn). This is […]