The Answer Engine Answer?
So, yeah, we’re all dialed into the fact that it’s always darkest just before the gloom; conditions where it’s well-nigh impossible to discern the nose on your face, much less the next step in the road.
Whether that leads to a luxuriant bed of roses or a hell of a drop, also TBD.
Clarity points to this jagged edge:
All those flashing yellow lights — some real, some maybe figments — have spawned a pandemic of hesitancy and transactional thinking in advertising-slash-marketing not seen since, well, the pandemic.
Between wars, economic zigs, polarization, and shambolic governmental dismemberment, there are so many shoes waiting to drop we might as well all be living in a Crocs store.
Sadly, not a Niketown. Too damn easy to figure out.
Anyway, all this gets me thinking about a question I’ve never seen adequately answered when the uncertainty meter starts pegging..
How do we convince clients to skip “quarterly capitalism” and think in longer and more strategic terms?
Advertising’s Pavlovian answer has always been to trot out the usual creaky suspects, all of them repeating “brands that promote during a downturn come out as winners.”
To which the equally Pavlovian client push-back has been, “Do I detect the stink of self-interest?”
No surprise, when the choice is between keeping my executive job or your always-too-fat advertising budget, trust gets thin on the ground.
Of course, we now have new sources of grist, courtesy of a highly lauded presentation from System1’s Andrew Tindall with Les Binet and Sarah Carter.
They offer seriously robust data showing very large brand effects plus very large business effects happen when a company is consistent in strategy, creative, execution, and presence.
Their number: the high-end gain is a 6X profit advantage.
But, still, you have to wonder if even that kind of evidence is a blade sharp enough to hack through the underbrush of self-protective business necessity coupled with a tainting lack of faith.
But what if we were able to point to the hanging sword, that means you either prep your brand now or prepare to be a memory.
I’m thinking of the blazing fast adoption of AI-enabled search, soon to be followed by the inevitable advent of the AI agent.
Both are going to have massive effects on the ol' sales funnel.
Get this right and you can likely survive being “intermediated” by an AI platform that summarizes instead of letting people DIY on your website.
Don’t figure it out and, well, AI ain’t hanging fire.
Talk about sweet irony: tech that threatens to fold, spindle, and automate advertising into a race to the formulaic bottom does a double-triple head reverse to become the first truly effective argument to forgo short-termism in favor of owning both familiarity and the emotional high ground.
If you have a better idea, love it.
P.S. Do download “The Power of Compound Creativity” @ https://lnkd.in/ekBjYSGQ)