INSPIRATION

Five Truths and a Chai

The path to breaking out of a corona-induced fog

I’ve spent my career thinking about media’s role in establishing and nurturing the relationship between consumers and brands. It’s actually more appropriate to say I’m obsessed with it than to say I think about it, but I digress. In search of a much-needed, chai-fueled respite from coronageddon, I boiled down five immutable truths about media that impact its ability to affect these relationships:

1. The line between “media” and “creative” has never been blurrier. The meteoric rise of Google and Facebook has led us to think that everyone is searching for a buyable solution, all the time. When you convince yourself that’s true, then compelling creative communication becomes secondary to effective “targeting,” or so it might seem. But the obliteration of the line between media and creative should lead us to a different conclusion: media wonks and creatives should be joined at the hip.
2. It’s never been easier to be a creator. Each of us has a content creation device in our pockets at all times. While this democratization of content has been a boon to bloggers, influencers, and YouTube, it has eroded the care and feeding necessary to create emotionally resonant messaging that connects with people on a level deep enough to drive them to take action. It’s our shared responsibility to use the tools we have at our fingertips while also stopping this erosion. We’re smart; we can do both.
3. Media creates more valuable information in a day than we used to collect in a year. While our ability to know “everything about everybody” can give us a false sense of security, if we effectively mine the “fast” data produced by our everyday behaviors in the digital world we can establish a level of empathy that enables us to make truly consumer-centric decisions far more effectively. What a world.
4. Once impossible dreams can now seemingly come true. In the not too distant past, a conversation about marketing attribution was hemmed in by impenetrable constraints. But those constraints are being lifted, little by little, by the unswerving power of the combination of first- and third-party data. Those content machines we all have in our pockets? They’re data portals that lead us into another dimension, one in which true cross-channel, multi-touch attribution feels like it’s right in our grasp.
5. Everything is media. Or perhaps better stated, nothing is off limits. In a world in which everything is digital, traditional advertising revenue streams are under more pressure than ever before, and the average attention span is shrinking by the day, everything can be put to work as a medium. In fact, arguably it’s our gnat-like attention spans that make it a necessity to create media, not just settle for what can be bought off the shelf.

After 27 years in and around media I realize that it’s easy to be an apologist. In other words, to believe that the decisions we make in media are more important than any others across the marketing landscape. This tendency was likely instilled in me in the first week of my career when Ken Dice, one of my team’s Media Directors at Leo Burnett, held up a VHS tape during a training session and said, “This tape could contain the world’s most amazing creative, but it’s meaningless without an effective media plan.”

And honestly I probably instilled that tendency in others over the years when I stole Ken’s shtick and repeated that statement essentially verbatim with VHS tape after VHS tape. (Remember those?)

But while I’m committed to not give in to this tendency I do believe that if you don’t understand how a brand will take advantage of these five truths then you can’t fully understand how to innovate, shape, or project the long-term future of the brand. It’s in the common thread that runs through them that we find the way forward: we have to work harder than ever before to create connections between consumers and brands, but when we do we can confirm we’ve done so faster and can nimbly use media to reinforce them.

As always, brand development in the absence of a media lens can be tone deaf. And media planning in the absence of brand insight can be missionless. Understanding this is especially relevant for those of us focused on innovation or on developing brands from scratch in the direct-to-consumer (DTC) space.

So what? As we prepare to navigate our way out of the corona-induced fog I for one am calling on my team now more than ever to treat media and message as the interconnected web that they are. To never give in to being an apologist. And to use the five truths as the foundation for what’s next.