Listening to stories

Here’s some good advice from the analogue age – which is vital also for the digital age.

This is wisdom received from a successful entrepreneur in the land of finance from the days before the “entrepreneur” was ubiquitous.

He taught me that there are two rules for success:

First, never reveal everything you know…

Perhaps more helpfully, he also taught me from an early age about the five rules for normal management.

Over the coming posts I’ll show how the ‘five rules for normal management’ apply excellently to great digital management.

Let’s start with rule number five:

Five: Perseverance
Persist. Persist. Persist. When it looks desperate: persist. When it’s going well, it can be done better. Persist.

From a business management perspective,“Persist. Persist. Persist.” is a valuable mantra. It’s not a unique point to drum home. A fabulous SVP – when I was new business director at Y&R Europe – used to play with the good ol’ marketing mix and the FourPs, to remind us of the new “2Ps” of B2B marketing, “Persistence Pays”.

In a digital media perspective, persistence equals a sometimes too-high frequency rate. You know, the times when you’re being stalked by that annoying company that seems to follow you everywhere online?

In the old days we used to wonder how to measure “wear-out” of radio advertisements. There’s only so many times you can hear that repetitive jingle before you hate the radio station and the advertiser. Only you flick over to a different station to hear the ad again. That was because they had bought a high frequency during the times that you listened to the radio. This is in stark contrast to the radio ads with high frequency AND high rotation of creative copy.

Think about the soap operas of 1930’s USA on the radio, targeting housewives. An on-going story, an open narrative. Not a recurring jingle.

Nowadays we do that by “retargeting”. And all of a sudden we can do that cross-device. So now we need to find a way to produce more than one banner for one audience. We can produce a rotation of banners to different ethnicities across all the different times of day, say.

And all the while, in digital channels, we test, learn and optimise. We have to see what’s right and what’s not. And, of course, we persist with what’s working.

Which ads have been stalking you recently? And which ones have surprised and delighted you despite a high frequency? Very few, I bet!

Please do comment below!