15 things I've learned in 15 years of marketing, part 2

Note: this post is part of a series sharing 15 things I’ve learned in 15 years in marketing. The first post tackles learnings 1-5, this one will tackle learnings 6-10, and the remainder will follow in a final post later this year.

As you get further along in your marketing career you start to realise how little they actually tell you in school about how real marketing is done.

To be fair, school often tackles the theory and then the practice comes in the real world, as with most careers, but it seems especially glaring at times in marketing that the practical application of marketing never is truly represented in the classroom.

Here then are five more learnings I’ve picked up over the last 15 years in marketing.

6 - Great creative is hard work

I’ve been fortunate in my career to work with and alongside some great creative talent. Being a creative is an amazing job that I’m constantly in awe of if I’m honest. They put themselves out there, day after day, producing art for commercial purposes, and are forced to deal with withering criticism at times. Creatives certainly have thicker skins than I do, able to take feedback for the art they have just produced, make adjustments, and continue on as if nothing has happened. 

Great creatives put something of themselves in the best of their work, oftentimes working late into the evening to try and produce something new, fresh, that resonates emotionally while still embodying the brand. They need to understand design, emotion, technology all to know where they can push and where they might need to pull back.

Working at agencies, I can’t tell you how many awe-inspiring bits of creative get left on the cutting room floor. These concepts might get left because technology had not yet caught up to the idea, the lack of imagination on behalf of a client, budgets were insufficient to bring it to life, or there simply wasn’t time to make it happen. These ideas often times have the potential to transform a business if executed properly.

Creative work though is hard. It can be a simultaneously thrilling, exhausting, frustrating, and exhilarating experience. Sometimes the creative solution can come instantly, but oftentimes it takes more; more experimentation, more dead-ends, more trial and error, more inspiration. You have to grind the ideas out sometimes, while other times it just flows. And there’s no guarantee the process will get any easier over time, although experience certainly helps.

Bottom line is cut your creatives - whether in house or external - some slack. Let them push, experiment, break rules and you’ll likely get some incredible work on the other side.

7 - Authenticity matters

Consumers are savvier than marketers often give them credit for. Most know when they are being sold to and what to look out for from advertisers or salespeople. Marketers have tried different ways to combat this consumer savviness over the years: sponsored blog content that looks like organic content, affiliate blogs that look like they are providing ‘neutral’ reviews of products, sponsored social media posts that appear in feeds like organic posts, and the latest red-hot trend: influencers. 

Look, I get why influencers work; you are essentially taking a trusted ‘friend’ that you follow on social media and going by their recommendations for amazing products or services. It’s taking the principle of being recommended a new product by a close friend over drinks and extending it to the internet. Well that, and the concept of the celebrity endorsement. Strangely, influencers become celebrities because they are influencers, which if that's not the snake eating its own tail in marketing I’m not sure what is.

Suffice it to say, I’m not a fan of influencer marketing, despite how effective and growing I know it is at the moment. Influencer marketing is a bubble, and it will pop at some point. But why, why can’t this type of marketing go on forever? Part of the reason lies with advertisers themselves: they love to beat a dead horse. Once marketers get a hold of an idea, they go back to it again and again and again until it loses all meaning for the audience. The second is consumers wise up to the trick - they figure out that they are being sold to and stop engaging and reacting with the message and call to action.

That’s why I find it so important to build authenticity in your marketing, honesty, real connection with your audience. Part of this comes down to being comfortable and confident in your own self and the products you are selling that you can let your authenticity come through both for your or the brand’s personality, and the quality of the product. 

Will consumers know they are still being sold to? Absolutely, without a doubt. But your integrity and honesty as an individual and your belief in what you are selling them will likely help to get over any scepticism they might have. Is this more difficult to do? Without question. It’s much easier to blast messages over and over again, hoping to wear your audience down to finally buy, but they won’t want to come back to you again when they need that trusted partner who they know can help them find what’s right for them.

8 - Briefing well is a lost art

I was lucky that early on in my career I worked with some great ‘old-school’ marketers. I’m not sure they would want me to call them that, but I truly mean it as a compliment. Working much of my career in digital marketing I see the tendency to want to dump the old in favour of the new, but we can easily forget there is much to learn from those who came before us.

Briefing - both the written brief and verbal briefing - seems to have been lost somewhere along the way in the modern marketing profession. Maybe it’s due to most of our work taking place in email and chat (Slack or Microsoft Teams) that we think a line or two is sufficient to fully brief either internal or external resources on the job that’s required. I have to say that it is rare for me to find anyone under 40 these days who knows how to brief properly.

I’m not saying every brief needs to be a full-blown marketing communication brief for a new brand or campaign, but even basic production briefs are falling short. What most people doing the briefing don’t seem to understand is if they take more time upfront to get the brief right, the work comes faster and easier. Unfortunately, I often see the opposite happen. People are so eager to get the brief in ‘quickly’ that it’s missing all the key information that’s needed to make the outcome(s) of the request successful and it ends up taking more time and being more frustrating for everyone involved.

I can tell you having worked on the side receiving briefs for a good portion of my working life, most are terrible. Most creatives and producers of work would tell you the same if they could. I would recommend to all those primarily responsible for writing briefs, if you’ve never received them to produce work, take a year of your life and go on the receiving side - you’ll know what I mean within a month.

In the meantime, some of the best advice I could give to up and coming marketers, or even those a few years on in their careers: get good at briefing, really good. Take a course, go through training, work for an agency that has a great briefing process. You will all of a sudden vault head and shoulders above your fellow marketing peers.

9 - External partners are essential

Many companies have famously tried to bring marketing work in-house that they shouldn’t. Apple goes through phases with TBWA/Chiat/Day despite the agency providing some of the most iconic campaigns in Apple’s history, and Pepsi famously tried to create their own in-house spot with Kendall Jenner. But why don’t these efforts to bring all marketing work in-house work? Why with all the resources of Apple or Pepsi couldn’t these massive companies figure out how to recreate the magic that agencies can bring?

In my mind, there are two key factors: perspective and experience. Let’s tackle perspective first.

When you work in house, you drink the kool-aid of where you are working. It may be a conscious choice to take the drink, or maybe it evolves over a number of years, but at some point, you have to accept and resolve your own cognitive dissonance to align what you do for 40-80 hours per week with your own personal values. Your colleagues around you have done the same, which is why you’re all still working where you are, and while this is great for teamwork and collaboration, group-think very quickly starts to set in. You start to think how amazing you are as a team, as a company, and that you can’t possibly put a foot wrong. This is especially dangerous thinking when you need to represent the brand and connect with your audience, many of whom have not drunk the kool-aid.

External partners, good ones at least, become this check then on the internal perspective, providing a robust external counter to how great you think you might be. Good partners will challenge, question, and work to find the truth that resonates with the customer, not just the board of directors.

Experience is also a critical factor in employing external partners. I don’t mean the number of years of experience, although that can be helpful. No, what I’m talking about is the diversity of experience with multiple brands, in multiple markets, with multiple target audiences. When you work in-house you often only work on one or a handful of brands, which dulls how well you can pivot to solve problems quickly. External partners though are constantly having to solve problems and deliver work on time and on budget to solve the business outcomes for their clients. There is simply no analogy with an in-house team to do the same under the same business pressures.

Now, I’m not saying that in-house teams do not have utility, they do, massively, especially as it is often less expensive to use them for production than external partners, but for that perspective and experience for big, transformative ideas, there’s simply no beating a great external partner.

10 - Emotional connection matters

I think that most of my colleagues that I’ve worked with over the last 15 years would agree that I’m a rational, logical thinker. I like things to line up, to have evidence and to support them, to be planned out and adjusted as circumstances in the market change. That has served me pretty well for much of my career, but I’ve realised in the last couple of years that’s not enough to do great work in marketing.

What I realised I was missing in my own work, in my own day-to-day thinking was considering how to create an emotional connection, to ignite passion and enthusiasm in my next project. This emotional connection might need to come through in a change initiative that I was championing internally, in the way I write my own briefs to my colleagues or external partners, or in the creative that comes out for the next marketing campaign, but I needed to excite others as much as I am often excited myself.

Those who have worked with me know that I don’t tend to show these emotions externally much - I have been called a ‘robot’ on more than one occasion - so I need to let more of myself bleed through into my work, to hold my emotions more on my sleeve to help others understand the excitement I have for what’s coming up or what we have the opportunity to create together.

This emotional connection within myself and an organisation is then felt by the audience externally. If the audience can feel the passion, the excitement, the zeal an organisation has for what it is promoting, they will connect with it more. They may not always agree or buy into it, but they will care more about what the organisation is saying. 

Unquestionably this area is a work in progress for me, but it's one that I know is essential to create any great marketing work in the long term. 

Closing thoughts and looking ahead

Having written two of these posts now sharing what I have learned in marketing over the past 15 years I realise how much of it has come as a result of great mentors and always being willing to put my hand up and dive into the hard work to be done. 

I often think to myself I could make my work life so much easier if I took the short term fix over the long-term solution, I would still get to do some fun work and have a nice time working with people I enjoy spending time with. Deep down though I know that would be a cop-out, that I wouldn’t truly be satisfied focusing only on outputs versus outcomes.

The best mentors I have worked with over these past 15 years have shown me the big, bold, difficult work is not only the most satisfying but leads to the best outcomes for the business. That’s why I continue to love marketing after all this time, what excites me to get up in the morning: to try and make dramatic change that shifts the paradigm for the organisation.