Tadpole vs. Firehose

I’m gonna make a bold statement: When given a choice between consuming a piece of entertainment OR a piece of marketing, 99% of humans with a pulse will pick the entertainment.

This is common sense.? It’s human nature.? We all know this.

The vast majority of what brands produce is marketing.? This is an objective fact.

Said another way, brands are constantly investing huge resources into making content that people will choose not to watch.

This is broken.

It’s broken especially in an environment where a plethora of entertainment is at our fingertips, at all times, on all devises.? We have been trained to expect to be entertained constantly, AND we have been trained thru swiping and skip ad button to discard anything that doesn’t.

No amount of flashy graphics, quick gags, or anything else a traditional agency comes up with is going to make a dent in this.

Marketing content has the raw horsepower of a tadpole and it’s being asked to swim upstream against fire hose.

But brands have a choice.? They CAN make entertainment.? They can be part of that firehose.

TV producers have been doing this for brands for decades. Remember the food show Unwrapped? That was a gigantic ad for every candy company featured.? (Amazingly it took a couple of seasons until larger brands recognized what an opportunity being on that show was - and only then agreed to be featured.)

I personally sold amusement parks for three seasons of Insane Coaster Wars on Travel Channel. Every time an episode premiered the parks featured in it had an immediate and measurable rise in attendance.

In all of these situations the brands were passive in the development of this content.? They were waiting around for shows like ours to stumble along and find them.? And when we did those brands felt lucky.

Now, BRANDS CAN MAKE THEIR OWN LUCK.

If brands make good, entertaining content, a platform will distribute it.? Heck, a platform might even pay for the content.

And even if that content doesn’t land on a platform, there’s always YouTube, Tik Tok, Insta or… a brand can make its own FAST channel.

That entertainment CAN also achieve key marketing objectives including brand awareness, engagement, consumer advocacy, and more.? Look no further than Formula 1 and many of the other shows developed with brands I constantly point at.

The economics of this look different than traditional marketing campaigns - and that’s good.? TV shows are a bargain to produce compared to most marketing campaigns, they live forever without media buys, AND UNLIKE ADS people will watch them.

Brands need to be part of the fire hose.? Not the tadpole.

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