SD#12: Sameness, deep work and bothism
April 03, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to the eleventh edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more. As the newsletter is still in it’s infancy I will experiment with the way I send you ideas. Do let me know if you like or dislike something you see.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) ROI forces marketers to focus on short term results. This in turn harms creativity. There is no shortage of focus on return on investment (ROI) in marketing departments. The metric invaded corporate structures like an evil parasite and makes everyone dance to the same tune as if controlling us like a puppet doll on strings. The issues with focusing on ROI are various and numerous, especially when used outside the realms of short term metric evaluation. It forces us to optimise and optimise and optimise till we start throwing up nonsense deciding that the best ROI can be achieved by simply stopping that activity. ROI can be even more harmful to creative campaigns. Creativity cannot be measured in the realm of ROI. It can barely be measured in any marketing metric and attempting to do that will eventually lead to the complete dullness of all campaigns. Keep ROI to short term activation campaigns. |
2. (Copywriting) People know what you do, you have to sell them on who you are I read Cole Schafer’s newsletter Honey Copy every week. Cole is a brilliant copywriter and turns words into playful magic that you can sing in your head. What I learnt from his writing is how he focuses on describing experiences and perceptions of the world more than he talks about himself and what he does. It is quite dull to say ‘I am a writer’ but saying ‘I sit down every week in a dusky bar with my pen and paper to probe words while I sip my glass of whisky’ kind of puts an image in your head of the type of guy writing it is. |
3. (Business) Sameness is commercial suicide People love to benchmark themselves to others. We love it so much that we helped create one of the largest companies in the world (Facebook). The habit transcends itself to business life too as we look for inspiration from what others are doing and try to copy them. The problem is that if you copy someone’s work, you are automatically abandoning the chance of ever being the best. In the best-case scenario, you will end up second best. At worst, the idea will vanish from business journals as people ignore another version of something they have seen. Sameness is commercial suicide. |
4. (Marketing) There should not be a divide between brand and performance – the two complement each other A number of years ago the work of Peter Field and Les Binet revolutionised marketing by showing how brand campaigns are equally or more important than short term activation campaigns. The subsequent years meant a refocus on brand and a fracture ruptured between the two. People started arguing for brand campaigns, others for activation. What was missing was ‘bothism’, as termed by Mark Ritson. Both are necessary for the successful marketing of any company. The brand campaigns (long term) plant the seeds that will eventually turn into trees and bear fruit. Activation (short term) campaigns are there to pick the low hanging fruit. |
5. (Productivity) Deep work will become one of the best skills for future talent As described by Cal Newport in his book, deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It is a skill that lets you quickly process complicated information and produce better results in less time. In today’s world, we are engulfed in a chaotic frenzy of e-mails and social media, which hinder our way to deep work. One thing that will set future talent apart from others is the ability to get back into the zone of deep work. Cal Newport |
6. (Productivity) Career athleticism will also shape future talent It’s time to face the fact that career progression is not linear. Platforms like Fivver, Task Rabbit are allowing work to be organised in new ways, resulting in a more part-time, distributed, flexible, short-term workforce. Career athleticism will build skills for multiple settings and environments. Building structure out of autonomy, leading through ambiguity, and creating vocation will be essential. The Hill |
7. (Marketing) Sadly (and unfairly) to small companies, brand size contributes to around 18% of advertising effectiveness When one starts the journey to create an advertising campaign it is only natural to start by thinking about what will increase the success of the campaign. Standard choices that come to mind first, such as the channel that the campaign will run on, the precise selection of the target audience, or even how you set your budget between these factors, are not that important. The most important and vastly outweighing other factors is creative execution which will increase your advertising effectiveness 12 fold. And the biggest contributor to advertising effectiveness is brand size and its share in the market which will increase the effectiveness 18 fold. |
Fun things to click on:
GyShiDo – the art of getting shit done. 40 animators from around the world collaborated on a 2-minute video called Pass the Ball. Hidreley Diao uses AI to capture what historical figures would look like if they were modern people.
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