Hi, I’m a marketer, and my opinion is worthless
Have you ever seen an ad or other marketing content, and thought, wow, that’s great? Or wow, that sucks?
Of course you have. Because you’re a human being with emotions, and advertising is designed to trigger that kind of response. Even objectively terrible ads can have positive impact.
Advertising used be more important and impactful than it is today. It’s almost hard to remember that everyone, no matter their age or ethnicity or tastes, would watch the same handful of available TV networks, with no fast forwarding through ad breaks. The narrowness of our media options meant that some commercial messages became regional or even national sensations.
The earliest Big Ad that I personally remember was a spot for Wendy’s called “Where’s the Beef?” As a cultural phenomenon, it was as huge as Pac-Man or Magic Johnson, and as a meme it earned more universal attention than any meme in 2022.
If you’ve never seen the ad, here’s 30 seconds of American mass media history:
When I talk about the “Where’s the Beef?” campaign with people under 40 today, they’ve never heard of it. But in its day, the ad was referenced everywhere, all the time, for a solid year. The phrase even made it into a presidential debate. Clara Peller, the venerable actress who said the line, was briefly a household name.
Now, if you’re a marketer, as I am, you may look at an ad the way a musician listens to a song. You’re looking for intent, execution, messages, cues, social signals, and the takeaway.
“Where’s the Beef?” had a strong message: The standard McDonald’s hamburger was skimpy on the meat, while the Wendy’s Single patty was bursting from the bun. This reflected the difference between a money-driven corporate chain and a quality-focused upstart. Where would you rather eat? (Lots of quick-service restaurants these days, including Panera and Chipotle, still rely on that message.)
Everybody loved the Wendy’s ad in a way that’s hard to imagine everybody loving anything today.
Now I’m going to challenge you to think of an ad you hate. Go on, pick one that really annoys you.
For example, this gentleman on LinkedIn hates the latest Adidas sports bra ad that shows a grid of women’s bare chests.
Here’s a marketer who’s decided that this campaign for women’s sports bras is so awful, it’s probably for pedophiles. (He really, really hates the human body.)
Now here’s an example I absolutely hated when it ran. Watch it below. I used to see it all the time on TV, and it made me angry every time.
What’s going on in this ad? Well, in the late ’90s, America was rapidly suburbanizing. The affluence driven by a bubbly stock market and a boom of Millennial babies, combined with an urban crime rate that was much higher than today’s, was driving young families to buy homes far from the city. And cheap gas, well under $1 a gallon, drove demand for ever-larger vehicles. (Is there anybody more short-sighted than an American choosing a vehicle based on current gas prices?)
SUVs created a sense of safety for soccer moms and dads, even though these heavier vehicles made the roads much less safe for everyone else. And the social cost? Global warming was definitely a thing in ’99, but it occupied far less concern than what was happening that week on Ally McBeal.
So when I saw this ad whose only theme was, “This vehicle is so big I lost my child inside it,” I was pretty livid.
But then again, the people in the ad tell you exactly whom it’s for, and it’s not an urban single guy in his 20s. Certainly Land Rover had done its research about what an affluent, surburban mom born in the 1960s wanted most from her next vehicle.
Watching it now, I don’t hate it anymore. Not because I can better empathize with the protagonist, but because I can better empathize with Land Rover’s marketing team.
Now here’s an ad from the same era that I loved!
OMG, chills. It’s objectively a brilliant ad. But more importantly it was for me; it reflected my demographic, my aspirations. I wanted to be invited to a party with my cool friends, and then be way too cool to attend.
This was an era when Volkswagen made terrific ads for young Gen Xers. They worked. I bought a goddamned Volkswagen GTI.
If you’re a marketer who knows what they’re doing, you may hate an ad, but you may also understand that it’s totally amazing. And in retrospect, the Land Rover soccer mom spot is an amazing ad inside an effective campaign. It has a simple message, and its quiet space and anticipation make it captivating and rewatchable. Fuck that ad, it’s terrific.
Let’s look at another ad from six years ago. Trigger warning:
This Google display ad from 2016 knows exactly who it’s for and what it intends to do. It’s a terrible ad, and I hate it, and it’s also perfect. The message is simple: supporting Trump is an expression of American Pride. The design is clear: Metallic letters communicate strength. A star in the middle with the red lines stretching out evokes the side of a military fighter jet, even though the man himself was a draft dodger. The call to action is clear: Add Your Name. (And then donate and probably get ripped off in the process.)
But if I were somehow trying to make a Trump ad appealing for myself, I would do everything differently, and it probably wouldn’t work at all.
And this gets me to my point. If you’re a good marketer, your opinion is worthless.
What does this mean? It means your job is to channel your customer. And not just your customers’ desires as they relate to your product, but the design, colors, sounds, imagery that makes them feel what you want them to feel.
This may sound incredibly obvious, but it’s actually very, very hard to do. Putting a campaign out there in the world that isn’t personally appealing to you can just… hurt.
Be the ball, not the club
Now let me tell you the story of a incompetent marketer: Past Me.
I took my first full-time marketing job in 2010, after a prior decade in product management and team leadership. Among my glaring skill gaps when I got to that job at YouTube was my judgment of effective graphic design.
This was probably because I’d spent much of the prior decade working at a retail bank where our style was deliberately dry, unobjectionable, and highly regulated by the government. Everything we did was just facts, which were checked, challenged, and re-checked. We actually had two full-time employees in our department completely dedicated to the fine print of account disclosures. We used to joke that the lawyers were the marketers.
My first month at YouTube, someone on my team sent me a motion graphics file from our animation agency, for a video about how popular online video had become. I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. But before I could open my mouth, this marketing manager said, “Isn’t this such a load of trash? I’m so disappointed with that agency.”
He was a more experienced creative producer than I was, so I took his word that the animation design was “bad.”
Over the course of the next year, I realized that everything he produced had a particular style to it. He had developed his own aesthetic that represented what he thought looked cool and interesting from his years working at creative agencies.
But at one point, a sales executive approached me about a product video our team had produced. “It’s too radical,” he explained. “My customers are mostly Baby Boomers trying to pay their kids’ college tuition. These videos make us look like we’re marketing to their kids, not grownups who make serious business decisions.”
It was a wake-up call. Our team had been producing cool content that reflected the cool factor of our products, based on what we thought was cool about them.
But our customers didn’t want us to be cool. They wanted us to be reliable. They wanted us to be safe. The wanted us to help them achieve their objectives. They wanted assurances that we understood them and would make them successful in their jobs.
We’d been making stuff we “liked.” But a lot of our customers didn’t like it. The messages were correct, but we didn’t communicate them effectively to the audience. The style was way off. So we changed direction.
How well do you understand your customer? If you really “get” them, you may end up making content that seems boring to you, or maybe radical, silly, ugly, or dumb. People at agencies know this well. They spend most of their careers creating persuasive media that isn’t appealing to themselves at all. Sometimes they’re producing a sugary breakfast cereal campaign for tweens, and then a dry B2B enterprise software campaign the very next week. Sometimes they even make stuff they really hate.
As a marketer, your job isn’t to impress your peers or win awards. It’s to influence the right people to think and do the right things. If those people aren’t like you, you have some work to do.
Three tips to assure you’re speaking to your customer, not yourself
Now let’s review some methods to get you in the mindset of creating marketing content that works.
(1) Start with the persona, not your product. If you’re making a campaign, don’t start with the product you’re selling. Repeat: Never, ever, ever start with the product. Start with the person you’re trying to influence.
Any segment is going to be diverse in its own way, but you should be able to lock down certain facets of the personalities within. For example, at the aforementioned retail bank where I worked, our small business customers were overwhelmingly:
- Patriotic
- Affluent
- Disdainful of taxes and regulations
- Optimistic
- Driven and hard-working
- Community-focused
These attributes cut across race, age, and region. So our messages focused on acknowledging how hard they worked to build their own financial destinies, and thanking them for their contributions to the prosperity of their communities and the USA. Our products and our customer service existed to support them with those aspirations.
(2) Remove the words “I like” and “I don’t like” from your lexicon. When someone is presenting creative work for feedback or decisions, you may think a concept or creative execution is pretty good. And then you’ll probably say “I like that.” Or maybe “I prefer that option.”
Phrases like these have two negative consequences. First, it makes your taste the arbiter of the effectiveness of the creative. As we’ve already discussed, you are not the customer. Even if your personality and demographic profile are squarely within the target segment, you bear the curse of knowledge about your product.
Second, this feedback doesn’t help anyone else on your team to be more effective. Their job isn’t to create stuff you “like.” Their job is to create stuff that influences the right people to meet the company objectives. If you’re not providing feedback about why some creative is more effective than another, then you’re missing an opportunity to open a discussion about the target customer, and to train others
So instead of saying “I like that,” explain why it works. Some examples:
- “This creative is simple to understand and aligns with the message.”
- “This is visually arresting, and the customer will aspire to be like the people in this.”
- “This is easy to read and memorable.”
If you’re on the other end of someone saying “I like that,” never be afraid to ask why, so you can see if they’re expressing something that aligns to the campaign objectives, or if they’re just expressing their personal tastes.
(3) Embrace being wrong. The best thing about modern marketing is that you can test a bunch of stuff and see how wrong you are. The mythical John Wanamaker quote about “half my advertising spend is wasted” is a relic, because now you get real-time evidence that you were totally, humiliatingly wrong.
I love being wrong.
A few years ago, I drove marketing strategy at a seed-stage startup. We were trying to bootstrap a product that wasn’t quite viable. But my objective was get signups for the paid version of the product.
So I tested a bunch of social media ads featuring our pilot customers. I made the ads myself and ran some Facebook and Instagram campaigns.
One of our customers was a statuesque fitness instructor, who sent me a set of professional photos of herself stretching and working out in the branded gear she had developed.
Another of our customers was a visual and performance artist who sent me some self-made photos of herself with drips on paint on her face and arms.
The fitness ad set looked amazing, and I wrote some absolutely dazzling copy to go with them. The artist ad set looked meh. Some of the Instagram comments on the ad mocked the paint drips, as in “Looks like a bird shit on her lol.”
Well, the fitness ads got very few clicks and signups. But the artist ad set was our top performer, with the most bird-shitty one (excerpted above) wildly outperforming all our other ads, including another ad set with a musician that I thought looked awesome.
The intrigue of this attractive artist with paint on her body drew people’s attention, and also led to more signups and paid conversions. It transformed how I approached advertising the product.
Testing ads will uncover fundamental truths about the audience. It can transform your message, but also help you make deeper inferences about their interests and psychology. And you don’t need to pay for a focus group.
You be me for a while, and I’ll be you
If you don’t understand the people you’re marketing to, I’d recommend spending some time with them. Ask questions, have a conversation. Really listen. Don’t judge. Don’t disagree or argue. Just listen.
If you can put aside your perspectives on the world and accept theirs, you can create the content that will attract their attention, persuade them, maybe even drive action.
It sounds hard, and it is, but also people do it all the time. Remember that toy commercial that got you all agitated with desire when you were nine years old? Literally zero nine-year-olds made that ad.
You can do it, too. Just remember, unless you’re selling to yourself, your opinion is totally worthless.
