Ten Years Gone
Ten years of blogging gives you some perspective. Perhaps, just how foolish you can be.
creative
Why Data Driven Content Fails Alone
We live in an era of social media trends and data analysis. All of these tools mean nothing without a good story.
The Battleground of Creativity
Without creativity we cannot differentiate and excel, and yet sharing creative ideas inevitably leads to a mockery at times.
The worst thing we can do is simply call a creative spirit a failure. It’s amazingly hard to remain creative if you listen to outside voices. This is particularly true in a world where declaring fail with a pic and a hashtag seems to generate lots of laughs and comments.
Creativity requires a resilience in the face of “fail,” “that sucks” and firm “nos.” It’s not that the every creative idea deserves to be praised. Truthfully, many inspirations make you want to run for the woods.
To successfully create you need to produce a consistent flow of ideas that fail because it’s part of the process. Success requires failure. At the same time, you also need to know how to optimize creativity, and also when to stop creating, and simply work through and polish concepts off.
Sure, silver bullets arrive, but in actuality most decent ideas require refinement, further innovation, and polish.
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The Marketing Code Disconnect
Code Secret by Desparlsp
Marketers don’t get code, and coders don’t get marketing. It’s the new Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
Just consider the awkward conversations between SEOs and traditional branders. That’s inside the marketing department.
When an entire profession of creative people, writers and business networkers have had technologies thrust upon them thanks to the incredible Internet successes of the past decade. That creates the major challenge facing modern marketing software companies… Making technological functionality intuitive and easy.
Creative Destruction in Marketing
The movement towards data-driven marketing makes creativity the most important asset they can offer.
Specifically, great marketers will engage in creative destruction of data driven norms and disrupt market standards to stand out.
It’s not that they will ignore their customers and their feedback, the fruits of marketing automation’s analysis of big data. Rather, they break the established marketing norms of their peers and competitors built around those tools.
Schumpeter’s economic theory of creative destruction means more now as we seek to apply norms and rules to all that is social and the way we interact. For those unfamiliar with Schumpeter, a watered down version of the theory is that economic development arises out of the destruction of prior order.
With marketing becoming intrinsic to all brands’ long-term health in a distributed world of relationships and interactions, breaking through cluttered “me, too” marketing matters more than ever.
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Death by Silo
Mad Men has to be my favorite TV show of the past decade, paying homing to the ad agency business in its formative years. It highlights the importance of great creative, ideas and writing that speak to customers while giving… Read More »Death by Silo
When Someone Takes Your Proposed Campaign Concept
Image by Laserone Recently, I had a prospective client take a proposal idea and implement it themselves. Having your campaign concepts taken is an all too frequent occurrence in communications consulting, unfortunately. You have to show some flare to get… Read More »When Someone Takes Your Proposed Campaign Concept