For Creatives, Strategists & Marketers

Last month professor Byron Sharp gave a talk at a conference during which he laid waste to several broadly accepted marketing concepts.?

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute director said attention metrics were nonsense, claimed Les Binet and Peter Field’s research on marketing spend was based on unsound data, and dismissed cross-media synergies as ‘a bit of a myth’.?

Sharp’s comments caused quite the ruckus, as these things go, and in the weeks that followed the event, practitioners and commentators took to their keyboards to defend attention metrics and Binet and Field’s research.?

But the dismissal of cross-media synergies went largely unchecked, and that seemed remiss to us. Earlier in the year we’d?published?a summary of a paper on how different combinations of media channels affect the performance of ad campaigns, so we contacted one of the authors of that study to ask what he made of Sharp’s comments.?

Not much, as it turned out.?

Felipe Thomaz, the associate professor of marketing at Oxford University’s Sa?d Business School, told us that Sharp's comments were baffling and ignored 60 years of published work.?And he didn't stop there.?

Thomaz went on to say that Sharp's seminal book,?How Brands Grow, 'breaks' branding by ignoring differentiation, relies on data that describes static markets, and has been abandoned by most high-end marketers.?

You can read our full interview with Thomaz?here.?And, if you want to hear more from Thomaz, then join us at?Most Contagious?on 24 November in London where he'll be a guest speaker.

Join us at Most Contagious in London on 24 November as we distil a year’s worth of marketing campaigns and trends into a day of inspirational talks.?

No panels and no pointless celebrity guests – just insight-packed content curated to help you steal a march on the year ahead.

There's a limited amount of First Release tickets on sale for ￡550 right now (￡800 full price), so hurry to secure your place at the best price. Click on to find out more about who’s speaking and to book your place.?Contagious.

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Photo by Pete Nuij on Unsplash