SD #3: creativity, Zeigarnik effect, and annual reviews
January 30, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to the third edition of Seven Dawns. I hope you will learn something new today. Let me know if there is something you would like to hear more of or if you’ve you learnt something fascinating this week. Now onto the newsletter…
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) I spent most of my career doing B2B (business-to-business) marketing and I sometimes get asked why it gets so little attention compared to its B2C (business-to-consumer) sister. The simplest answer is because marketing was born out of B2C. Most of us can recall adverts promoting Coca-Cola, Heinz mayo or Mr Clean. Not many of us can remember an IBM or a Salesforce ad, despite them reaching TVs as well. Marketing was born out of adverts for these big consumer organisations. |
2. (Marketing) Creativity in the advertising world has been declining for years now. I’ve written a whole article on it but one of the key issues we face today is that people try to measure creativity the same way they measure other business metrics. Sales, revenue, return on investment, conversion rates – they’re great metrics to use to measure your profitability, but if you attempt to use the same maths for creativity you will run into a problem. Look at creativity holistically, what benefits are you reaping from better creative? |
3. (Psychology) People tend to remember and be affected by unfinished tasks, in psychology it is called the Zeigarnik effect. Use this to beat procrastination as once you start something, you will be more inclined to finish it. Once you’ve made a start, however trivial, there will be something drawing you on to end it. |
4. (Growth) I admit I only completed my annual review a few weeks into January (I should have used the Zeigarnik method to start earlier), but I was once again reminded of how powerful annual reviews can be, whether in business or personal growth. Plan them in advance and make a tiny start early to be drawn back to it. If you need inspiration on how to get started, try out this template from Ness Labs. |
5. (Marketing) In the marketing world, we have a tool/channel called programmatic, which is a fancy way to describe automated bidding on digital banners that you see on most websites. The premise of this type of purchasing has been to make life easier for publications that want to sell space on their website but don’t want to deal directly with every advertiser. An intermediary (Google) connects advertisers and publishers so all of this can happen instantly and a publisher gets paid fairly for selling that slot. In theory that sounds great. In practice, 50-70% of programmatic spend by advertisers does not reach the publisher and it is one of the biggest frauds occurring in today’s world. Billions of dollars are wasted ‘in the abyss’ of programmatic as it became unnecessarily complicated. |
6. (Internet) If you’re in marketing or have your own website or a little business on the side, I’m sure you’ve looked at ‘competition’, who your audience might also go to. In the digital space though, we are all competing against ‘desktop’ time for consumers. Amazon shopping competing with Netflix, Tesco online grocery shopping competing with YouTube binging, my little blog site competing with everything else you could be doing on the internet. |
7. (Psychology) The rumour that some people are more right-brain or left-brain is a myth. The myth is rooted in a tiny bit of real science. We know that the right and left sides of the brain do specialise in different kinds of tasks, but the divisions of labour in the brain are a lot more complex than left and right. Maths, for example, requires logic and thus is often said to reside in the left brain. But maths is also a creative endeavour as well as a logical one. So a mathematician will not have any dominance of one side of the brain. Neither will a painter or a musician. |
Fun things to click on:
The most brilliant essay I have ever read on personal wealth comes from professor Scott Galloway – The Algebra of Wealth. I try to re-read it every once in a while. The power of self-reflection at work. Did you know most private planes can be easily tracked using publicly available information? Well, this Twitter profile tells you the location of Elon Musk’s private plane.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom