Building the Craft
As higher ed marketers we are told:
Our audiences’ attention span is shrinking
Our audience craves authenticity
Our audience can’t be sold to
And yet,
More than 1 million people watched a three hour movie in its first three weeks
Credit card statements often tell a different story
And loyalty is fickle at most
If you combine this with the litany of ad platform best practices meant for optimizations, it’s starting to feel like we’ve completely shaped our perspective around arbitrary conventions.
Howard Gossage famously stated: “People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” Re-reading this quote make me wonder if our priorities have shifted from capturing interest to satisfying a code.
Or, perhaps, because media is central to marketers’ lives — the same conduits we send our brand messages through — that those messages will be central to our audience.
Are these conventions ultimately creating constraint? I think we end up starting from a position of weakness when we try and re-engineer “interesting” based on these arbitrary markers.
In fact, we are starting to see reports that have indicated our audiences believe that the entertainment and brand content they consume feels unimaginative — becoming increasingly mediocre. Is this a reflection of Dakota Johnson’s recent quotes regarding Madame Web?
It’s like we’ve created marketing’s version of Postman’s technopoly. We’ve followed the rules. We’ve placated the algorithm. We’ve solved the equation.
I’ve always liked this quote by Roger Martin: “Somebody who thinks of strategy as involving a lot of imagination, then figuring out how to produce what might be, even though they cannot prove it in advance with analysis, will beat you. They will outflank you.”
It’s constraints that often constrict our capacity for imagination — something we may need a little more of as competition for interest intensifies.
