The Essence of Content Marketing

The perfect customer is like a beautiful woman, distant and desirable and pursued by countless competitors. An appropriate metaphor, don't you think?

Most advertisers want ads that equate to a magical pickup line. 

Our ability to gain and hold attention depends entirely upon our ability to stimulate the curiosity of others.

Can you stimulate curiosity? If you can't, you will not hold attention. Not in your ads, not on the telephone, not face-to-face.

To earn my money, I must take the client through 5 steps that are easy to understand but hard to do. This is the process my staff and I use to grow little companies into big ones. But our magic can’t happen until we’ve extracted these answers from our client.

We tend to think of imitation as the opposite of innovation but I don’t believe this is true. “Opposite” indicates opposed positions, left and right. But my observation is that innovation and imitation are usually the second and third positions in a continuing circle that has improvisation as its starting point.

Every employee has opinions about the advertising that represents their company. This is natural I suppose because those ads, by extension, represent the employee as well. And so they tell the boss what they think, "and all of our customers think that, too."

But if the development of successful advertising were as instinctive as most people believe, a higher percentage of ads would be successful.

A radio commercial begins, "I'm Ronald Watersdown, and I'm here to tell you about a very important opportunity that I'm sure you won't want to miss. It's an incredible chance for you to..."

What did those twenty-nine words make you see in your mind?

Not much, right? But what about these?

 1. FaceBook, for business, is a mirage. 

Can it successfully gather a crowd to hear a band perform at a bar? Absolutely. Social media, social event. Can it successfully be used by a physically-existing retail or service business as a substitute for mass media? No. It cannot. 

 A rich knowledge of history is better than creativity.

Let me qualify that. A rich knowledge of history is better than creativity if your goal is to make money.

The most profitable form of creativity is to repurpose the proven.

I am, by profession, a communications consultant. I craft strategies, write ads and buy media. My clients ask for my advice. They even pay me for it.

Advice is dangerous to give.

If you are thinking, “Yes, it’s dangerous to give advice because your advice might be wrong,” you probably haven’t worked full-time in a focused specialty for 30 years. Yes, there is a chance my advice might be wrong, but that’s not the principal danger. 

The critical first step in creative problem solving is to identify the defining characteristics of the problem. This is usually achieved, according to David Ogilvy, by “stuffing your conscious mind with information.” That’s the easy part. Our society swims in information. The second part, to “unhook your rational thought process,” is where it gets tricky.

Question: Is it more effective to communicate with others as you would have them to communicate with you, or should we strive to communicate with others in the manner they prefer to be communicated unto?

If I could give you the gift of Curiosity, I would risk a great deal to do it.

I would buy it for you illegally, inject it into your arm with a needle and watch as Life flowed into your eyes. I would do this for you because your future would brighten and your days would be full of wonder.

Joe Kraus is probably familiar with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago professor who said, “Humans cannot really successfully multitask, but can rather move attention rapidly from one task to the other in quick succession, which only makes us feel as if we were actually doing things simultaneously.” (The cognoscenti will recall this statement as part of the Magical Worlds Communications Workshop.)

Here’s what our Culture of Distraction means to marketers: 

Mediocrity comes from having perfectly implemented tried and true, traditional wisdom.

The outcome is the only thing that separates confidence from hubris. If your bold idea succeeds, you were a confident visionary. If your bold idea fails, the walking dead will accuse you of being full of yourself. “It was hubris,” they will say.

I grow weary of people who speak endlessly about goal setting. It’s like listening to someone agonize over where to take their vacation. I feel like shouting, “Just pick a place and GO there! Choose! Go! There’s cool stuff to do EVERYWHERE.”

How tall is your brand?

As long as we’re on the subject of brand identity and reputation, how are brands created in the first place? Is a brand merely the sum total of all the things a company says about itself?

Of course not.

Ads do, of course, play a big part in branding. Brand personality is communicated by:

The short answer is Yes, we want to keep reaching the same listener over and over, long-term. Don’t abandon one to move to another. I know it seems like common sense would tell us: “Once we’ve reached these folks, wouldn’t it make sense to move on and reach some new ones?” But people stay reached like a lawn stays mowed.  

Before we begin, you need to know that a “3.0 frequency” is RadioSpeak for reaching the same listener 3 times. TSL means “Time Spent Listening” and PPM is “Portable People Meter.”

This isn’t what Richard Exley said last week, but rather what I took from it:

If you want to be truly happy,

1. Commit to a cause greater than yourself.

2. Value people rather than things.

3. Give thanks for what you have instead of complaining about what you don’t have.

4. Celebrate the ordinary. Find joy in life’s daily pleasures. 

Much of what we buy is bought to remind ourselves - and tell the world around us - who we are.

But other times the purchase is less about the item and more about the hunt.