Marketoonist

“AI-Generated Homogeneity” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gDdJKg2p It’s still early days with AI Generation tools. We’re all still learning the potential and limitations. One watch-out is the bias toward homogeneity — the tendency for AI results to look alike. As AI predicts what to generate, the path of least resistance is an averaging of the content in its source material. Ian Whitworth once referred to this as “The Great Same-ning”: “ChatGPT, Jasper and all the rest are powerful conformity machines, giving you the ability to churn out Bible-length material about yourself and your business that’s exactly the same as your competitors.” A couple months ago, Oxford and Cambridge researchers illustrated the risk of homogeneity in a study of AI Generated content in Nature magazine. The risk increases as AI gets trained not only on human-created content, but on previous generations of AI-generated content. As an example, the researchers studied an AI model trained on images of different breeds of dogs. The source material included a naturally wide variety of dogs (French Bulldogs, Dalmatians, Corgis, Golden Retrievers, etc.). But when asked to generate an image of a dog, the AI model typically returned the more common dog breeds (Golden Retrievers) and less frequently the rarer breeds (French Bulldogs). Over time, the cycle reinforces and compounds when future generations of AI models are trained on these outputs. It starts to forget the more obscure dog breeds entirely. Soon it only creates images of Golden Retrievers. Eventually, the researches found, there’s “Model Collapse”, where the LLM is trained so much on AI-generated Golden Retriever images that the results turn nonsensical and stop looking like dogs at all. Now, substitute dog breeds for whatever you’re trying to create — new products, packaging, advertising, communication, and the risk is that all outputs devolve to look the same. A related study from the University of Exeter found that AI Generation tools can “boost individual creativity”, but with a “loss of collective novelty.” The good news is that this baseline situation creates opportunities for those who can push against this status quo. Homogeneity is ultimately at odds with distinctiveness. As with all tools, it’s all in how you use them. You can’t break through the clutter by adding to it. >>> For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gDdJKg2p To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #ai #cartoon #marketoon

“Marketing Change Agents” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/grVfBVJX Marketers are frequently the biggest agents of change in a business. Inside marketing teams, there’s a constant drumbeat for change, particularly when new members join the team. In my first marketing job, junior managers rotated to new brands every 12 months. Each new assignment brought fresh energy to make a mark on the brand. Higher level marketers rotated less frequently but pushed for higher level changes. In general, new CMOs are often the biggest change agents of all. From new packaging, to new campaigns, to new agencies, brands are constantly evolving. In some ways, the openness to change in marketing is healthy. Businesses overall can get stuck in a rut. But what’s gets lost in the revolving door of marketing newness is the power of consistency. Marketers get tired of our marketing long before consumers do. In many cases, constant change just makes it harder for consumers to recognize our brands. System 1 released a study last month proving that “consistency compounds creativity.” They tested brands in the UK and US on 13 measures of “creative consistency” (from positioning to distinctive assets to agency tenure) and mapped against brand and business outcomes. They found: “Not only were the most consistent brands more likely to produce better ads (3.3 stars on average vs 2.8 and 2.6 for somewhat and least consistent brands, respectively), but those in the top 20% for consistency generated more very large brand effects and very large business effects than those in the bottom 20%, including reporting twice as many incidences of profit gain.” As Contagious recapped the System 1 study: “It challenges the idea that brands need to be fearful about ad wearout. The creative success of good ads that are allowed to wear-in continues to grow. “It also emphasises the importance of identifying and committing to long-term brand platforms. Brands should be wary of abandoning a successful brand platform if the concern is merely a fear that people are getting bored of seeing the same work.” >>> For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/grVfBVJX To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“Always Be Upskilling” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gFA2Us4f “Upskilling” as a business term was coined in the late 70s. But the pressure to “upskill” has never seemed more acute. Andrew Geoghegan, CMO of William Grant & Sons, described the challenge of upskilling for marketers a few months ago: “There used to be significant investment in-house in upskilling teams and building on those core skills and competencies. “Now, though, teams are being put under pressure to deliver in volatile and uncertain times with no promise of that burden being eased. Even if there is a skills gap it doesn’t change the fact that someone has to do the work. “Doing ‘more with less’ was normally about marketing investment, but now it’s as much about people resource and doing the same amount of work with fewer people on the team.” Earlier this year, Marketing Week revealed “data and analytics” to be the biggest skills gap in marketing teams. In a survey of over 3,000 brand-side marketers, 37% pointed at a lack of “data and analytics” skills as the most urgent. But that’s just one skills gap of many. Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar described the current pressure to learn AI: “I bet for many marketers even one year back, AI was relatively irrelevant, but today if you don’t get up the curve and learn to start deploying AI intelligently, you can become obsolete.” Raja tries to set an example to his marketing team by personally spending “five to six hours” every weekend on his own upskilling. Upskilling is easier said than done. In the same Marketing Week survey, 48% of marketers said they have not been offered upskilling opportunities in the last 12 months. The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) recently reported that 56% of marketers are worried about burnout in their current role. >>> For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gFA2Us4f To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“Herding Cats and Strategic Alignment” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gyBTKeQV A few weeks ago, I drew a cartoon about the “silo syndrome” that most organizations struggle to navigate. It got me thinking about the challenge of strategic alignment in general — how hard it is to get and keep the extended organization on the same page. A big part of the marketing job is learning to manage by influence — a classic case of “accountability without authority.” Marketing is typically held responsible for results led by other functions in an organization. Marketing strategy not only needs to dovetail with the overall company strategy, it needs to be communicated in a way that the rest of the organization can understand and act on. I stumbled across a Harvard Business Review article from professors Vikas Mittal, Alessandro Piazza, and Ashwin Malshe that discovered a large gap between actual and perceived strategic alignment. In their study, 82% of employees reported that they felt strategic agreement in their companies. But when the researchers probed written explanations from those same employees about what the company strategies actually were, the real alignment was only 23%. This strategic misalignment can lead to all sorts of issues as companies work to make things happen. As the CEO of one of the companies in the study concluded: “Everybody seems to be interpreting strategy based on their functional silos, even members of our strategy team.” (As an aside, the “herding cats” analogy was famously used in a 2000 Super Bowl ad by EDS, an HP company. But I was surprised to learn that the first known reference to cat herding came from the 1979 Monty Python movie, Life of Brian.) >>> For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gyBTKeQV To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“The Growth Fairy” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gtAWw4jD I was struck by an observation from J. Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer at Kantar: “The foundational prerequisite of growth is the courage to grow. Impediments to growth sit within a company itself. Growth is rarely hostage to the marketplace.” I like the idea that a brand is not “hostage to the marketplace” — that marketers can take agency for brand results separate from what’s happening in the outside world. There has always been myth-making and wish-casting in what it actually takes for a brand to grow. Thanks to the work of Kantar and others, we have more data-driven resources to help guide our approach. A few months ago, Kantar released the results of a giant research study into what they believe drives brand growth — an analysis of 6.5 billion global attitudinal and shopper data points from the last 10 years. Kantar’s big takeaway is that “brands that are ‘meaningfully different’ to ‘more people’ command 5X penetration today and real advantage in penetration growth over the next two years.” They expand this into three simple rules for growth: 1) predispose more people, 2) be more present, and 3) find new space. It’s been 14 years since Byron Sharp of Ehrenberg-Bass wrote “How Brands Grow” and famously challenged the idea of “meaningful differentiation”: “Rather than striving for meaningful, perceived differentiation, marketers should seek meaningless distinctiveness. Branding lasts, differentiation doesn’t.” I find it interesting that Kantar reaches a different conclusion than Ehrenberg-Bass on the importance of differentiation. In marketing, like other areas of business, reasonable people can disagree. It’s a reminder that ultimately there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for growth. But it’s all better than placing our hopes on the Growth Fairy. For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gtAWw4jD To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“7 Deadly Sins of Data-Driven Marketing” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/g6KzYcNb My cartoons are often inspired by something I overheard the previous week. Last week, I traveled to speak at the GPeC Summit in Romania and got to hear UnMarketing author Scott Stratten’s entertaining take on marketing while I was there. Part of Scott’s talk included a rant on vanity metrics — the seductive allure of focusing on data that makes us look good. Vanity metrics are particularly rampant in digital marketing and can cause us to make really bad decisions. The term “vanity metrics” were first coined by Eric Reis in the Lean Startup. As Eric put it: “Vanity metrics may make you feel good, but they don’t offer clear guidance for what to do next.” The idea of vanity metrics got me thinking about each of the seven deadly sins and how they might apply in this increasingly data-driven world. Data is never just about the data — it’s how we use and make sense of the data. How we interpret the data is subject to the same human biases and foibles that drive everything else we do. Of course AI promises to help with data-driven decision making and yet AI is fueled by many of these same biases and foibles. As we look at the data, we have to continually sense-check where it came from and how we’re using it. For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/g6KzYcNb To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“The Silo Syndrome” - new cartoon and post: https://lnkd.in/gJn-nWjy One of my favorite marketing observations comes from HP founder David Packard: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” Our customers don’t care about our org charts. They don’t care which department is responsible for what. When they interact with different parts of a business, all they see is one brand. That means that every functional part of a company has a marketing role to play, whether they think about it that way or not. In 1988, a Goodyear manager named Phil Ensor coined the phrase “Functional Silo Syndrome” to describe how most organizations operate. He was inspired by the tall grain silos of his native rural Illinois, which reminded him of how departments, divisions, and geographies so often work in business: fragmented and insular. The “Silo” metaphor caught on and the “syndrome” has only gotten more challenging as the complexity of businesses has increased. I think that a big part of the marketing role is actually internal — helping the rest of the organization see the direct linkage between what they do and the end customers. Years ago, I helped bring the method cleaning products brand from the US to the UK. We had a small scrappy cross-functional team in London. At the launch, out of necessity, we shared the responsibility of customer service. Instead of a call center, the phone number on our products would ring in our actual office and we took turns talking to consumers on the “clean phone”. It was frustrating at times. One minute, we would be talking about supply chain issues or a promotion plan and the next we’d have to respond to Nigel from Edinburgh about a stain on his countertop. But it helped bring the customer into the room in a way I’d never seen before. Our brand eventually outgrew the “clean phone”, but I think it helped with our “Functional Silo Syndrome.” It reminded everyone in the office every day, from accounting, to product development, to marketing, who we ultimately worked for. For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gJn-nWjy To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“Brand Planning” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gG4CDbip Mike Tyson was asked his thoughts on Evander Holyfield’s fight plan before a WBA Heavyweight Title bout and famously responded: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” As we shift from Q3 to Q4 this week, brand planning season is in full swing for 2025, even as final 2024 numbers come into clearer view. The process includes a lot of horse-trading, haggling, and negotiating to choose the revenue target.?The core business team develops a bottoms-up plan they feel is achievable.?The leadership team sets a top-down stretch target that is much higher.?Then everyone bickers over the gap between the two numbers. A plan is outdated the moment it’s inked. Things change: customers change their mind, new opportunities surface, roadblocks appear. But a good plan helps us respond, not react, to those changes. I like this insight from Mark Ritson a few years ago: “Ignore the agility junkies who reject the need for any plan or demand something shorter-term. Of course, a strategy will always deviate as events unfold in unexpected ways. You need agility. But it does not replace the requirement of an initial strategy, from which to deviate in an agile manner. “That agility will be sparked by unknown events that will occur down the track, but strategy demands an a priori approach that pre-exists and predicates the nimbleness.” For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gG4CDbip To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“Creative Review by Committee” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gfanQj2t A few month ago, I heard Adam Morgan from eatbigfish and Jon Evans from System1 give a talk on the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull at the Cannes advertising festival. Adam and Jon shared analysis from Peter Field who found that a “dull” advertising campaign has to spend ￡10m more a year in media on average to get the same results as a campaign that’s “not dull”. Yet the majority of ads are dull. System1 collects how people feel about more than 100,000 ads to predict their long- and short-term potential. When Jon sorted the System1 database of ads by emotion, the most common emotion in these ads wasn’t Happiness, Surprise, or Anger; it was Neutrality, the absence of an emotion. I thought about this in the context of how the creative sausage gets made — the internal process of making any sort of creative work. It’s frequently dull by design. Creative work is usually not a Darwinian survival of the most interesting ideas; it’s survival of the safest ideas. And safe ideas tend to be neutral. Some of this I think comes from the creative review by committee. Creative work is inherently subjective. If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one. A creative review by committee leads to a peace treaty rather than interesting work. To carry over the emoji metaphor in this week’s cartoon, trying to make everyone happy can lead to everyone feeling neutral. I think we have to apply as much creative rigor to how we manage the creative review process as the creative itself. Creative projects require an editor — someone who can sort between frequently contradictory feedback, listening to some, ignoring others, and making the final call. A handy rule of thumb for creative reviews I heard early in my marketing career: “everyone should have a voice — not everyone should have a vote.” For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gfanQj2t To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon

“Sales-Focused Advertising” - new cartoon and post https://lnkd.in/gZypkR8r Peter Drucker wrote this in his 1973 book on management: “You have to produce results in the short term. But you also have to produce results in the long term. And the long term is not simply the adding up of short terms.” Business carries a bias toward short-termism in general, but particularly in marketing and advertising. There’s a fundamental tension between the goals of long-term brand building and short-term sales activation. The age of digital marketing and measurement helped swing the pendulum even further to pressure marketers into making every piece of communication tied to immediate ROI.?This approach can actually jeopardize overall effectiveness. Ehrenberg-Bass professor John Dawes found that only 5% of? B2B customers are in the market at any one time, so marketing focused primarily on sales activation misses the bulk of the opportunity. This echoes the findings of Les Binet and Peter Field in The Long and the Short of It that marketers consider a 60/40 rule in their advertising plans: 60% focused on brand building and 40% on sales activation. I was struck by this observation from Mark Ritson over the last week: “You can do both at the same time in an ad but it rarely works well, because you aren’t just trying to satisfy long and short agendas in the same 30 seconds, you are also being both rational and emotional. You are targeting a smaller group and the whole market. You are communicating the overall brand message and a specific product benefit. You are trying to change memory structures and elicit an immediate response. You are aiming for the top of the funnel and the bottom. You are driving your marketing car in fifth gear and reverse at the same time.” For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZypkR8r To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter, click here: https://lnkd.in/gZsC7Nhz #marketing #cartoon #marketoon