Cheryl Calverley, CMO at UK mattress brand Eve Sleep recently observed:
“We’ve reached peak performance optimization. Everyone has piled in and done the easy stuff in digital marketing … so we come back round in a circle. The only way to stand out from the crowd is creative.”
I like Chery’s sentiment of “peak performance optimization”. So much of the focus of marketing technology the last few years has been on the arms race component — adding the next shiny thing to the martech stack to allow marketers to reach audiences more effectively.
Yet the creativity of the message they use to reach those audiences is often overlooked in the race for performance and optimization. We can’t fix annoying marketing by making it more effective. Marketing automation can’t turn bad marketing into good customer relationships.
Just as marketers are gaining new technology to make it easier to reach potential customers, customers are gaining new technology to make it easier to ignore whatever marketers are trying to say to them.
Or as the outgoing global CMO for McDonalds, Silvia Lagnado, put it: “Tech is a means to an end. It’s people first, not digital first.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
“The Future of Digital Advertising” December 2015
“8 Types of Annoying Ads” June 2017
“The Evolution of Advertising” November 2017
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