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Has Your Marketing Become Digital Tapioca? Try the Big Idea!

The following great column by MEK's creative director appeared recently in Inside Indiana Business. If you work in any aspect of communications today, it's definitely worth a read!

Stop Commoditizing Communication – Capture the Strategic Creative Advantage

By Tim Meyers, Creative Director, The MEK Group

Is automation driving your marketing? Is your advertising and creative work dependent on templates and populated by clip art? Does your social media messaging automatically appear on Facebook, then on Twitter, then on your Web site – popping up over and over again until it’s digital tapioca?

What ever happened to the all-compelling “big idea” that drove brand messaging home, regardless of the channel or the platform?

This type of high-octane creative – which still exists today – represents a Big Idea that re-positions an entire company for success. It represents what companies used to go to advertising agencies for: a hot, creative idea that drove the business, an idea that transformed. These transformational ideas create strong, believable brands that literally became part of our culture.

Today, with all of the advances in communication, one might think that this principle is even more true. Ironically, the opposite has manifested itself in many instances, blurring strong communication elements down to meaningless blobs of redundant obviousness. Differentiation in an automated world is the next best thing to an oxymoron.

Advances in communication technology, in desktop publishing, in video production and in portable mobile devices should have created communication excellence. Instead, it’s created a new level of communication clutter that is nearly incomprehensible. Much of what passes for communication today is simply awful.

Because production capacity has become cheap, communication has lurched toward commoditization. A great idea, a great brand, a great campaign – these all take time to nurture, develop, produce and execute. Instead, it is far easier to cut budgets, slam together template ads, spots or PowerPoint presentations and then call it “communication,” even though few are certain to what it’s communicating or even whether it’s communicating. It’s incredibly – and unfortunately – easy to think that one is communicating, when in reality all that is happening is the creation of more and more confusing and brand-busting clutter.

With clutter comes anxiety, so bad communication bruises brands – some fatally – even though people may not be aware of it.

At MEK we’ve found three things that will help change the world and get us back to real communication.

1) Automation is not a bad thing, as long as it adds real value to all points of a transaction. Quantity is not necessarily quality, and in an era where plenty of alternatives exist, you want to ensure that you are tantalizing and delighting your customers with real authentic messages.

2) A strong creative idea, fueled by relevant and strong content, can change the world. Or it can at least change the world that you and your customers are used to.

3) Communication platforms like Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist a few years ago. Their replacements – or the platforms that will enhance them – are probably already in development. Accordingly, it’s not about the platform or the technology. It’s about the idea, the content, and the message.

Industry labels like advertising, PR and media buying are changing right in front us. What many PR, marketing and creative people do today – compared to a decade ago – is in most cases dramatically different. And there’s a reason for that change, due to the changing playing field. However, the Big Idea and how to make it strategically happen has always been a major key.

Want to be successful in the second decade of the 21st century? Resist the ease and the siren call of commoditization. There used to be a popular saying in advertising that went something like this: cheap, fast, effective – pick two. In today’s incredibly cluttered communication environment, the saying should perhaps go like this: savvy, simple, relevant – pick three.

Strategic marketing is not a commodity. It doesn’t come in a ready-to-use box. So, fight back and champion the big idea, the big brand, and cheerfully reject those efforts to commoditize real excellence in communication.

Stagflation - a look back or forward?

Back before the Great Recession, I put together the following blog about fears of stagflation and thoughts about when it first appeared. This was written pre-Stimulus and pre-quasi-recovery (the latter of course is expected to kick inflation into high gear). Now, with stagflation fears freshly appearing, I thought it appropriate to revisit this.

With economists presently nearly evenly divided [in 2008] on whether the U.S. economy is headed toward/already in a recession, the Associated Press weighed in Feb. 27 [2008] with an opine that the dreaded "stagflation" appears to be re-emerging. It didn't take a Nobel Prize-winning economist to predict that inflation would jump up, what with double- and triple-digit increases in gas, rising food prices because corn and other commodity food stuffs are being used for gas, and higher medical costs because (in part) Boomers are getting older and not dying off. So what does this mean?

Stagflation, of course, represents an unsavory economic condition where prices skyrocket while the national (these days, global) economy sputters. Kind of hard to manage if you happen to be President, given that economic incentives can ignite even further inflationary responses.

With the "me first" recession and stagflation predictions swirling around, this takes one back to the Nixon era, where the Administration was then battling the chaos fomented by the 1960s "guns and butter" economic policies of then-abhorred deficit federal spending (sound familiar in 2008 with Katrina and Iraq?). In the unstable summer of 1971, the British Ambassador to the U.S. showed up at the U.S. Treasury with an uncomfortable question: "I have $3 billion in American dollars here," he purred. "Would it be too much trouble to convert that into gold?"

With more than three decades between us and the summer of 1971, not too many probably remember top-of-mind that the United States used to be on the Gold Standard, with U.S. gold trading at the now-incomprehensible price of $45 or so an ounce. Lots of Treasury folks at that time probably grabbed their bottles of Rolaids in response to the English request. The United Kingdom at the time had yet to be bailed out from the discovery and subsequent pumping of lucrative North Sea oil, and her Majesty's former empire was then well on its way to collapsing into Second World economic and political status.

As Nixon wrote later in his Autobiography, "Whether we honored or denied this [British] request, the consequences of our action would be fraught with danger: if we gave the British the gold they wanted, then other countries might rush to get theirs. If we refused, then that would be an admission of our concern that we could not meet every potential demand for conversion into gold."

So Nixon not only left the Gold standard and floated the dollar in August of 1971, he - in his words - "proposed a series of economic controls and reforms that left even long-time wage and price control advocates breathless."

The long-time Adam Smith-thumping Conservative President apparently had an near-instantaneous conversion into a disciple of John Maynard Keynes. Nixon lamented that Eisenhower handed the country over to Kennedy in 1960 with an annual rate of inflation around an unbelievable 1.5%, but that it had ballooned up to 4.7% - a then-unthinkable level.

The floating and subsequent devaluing of the dollar was met with considerable scorn: the venerable economist Arthur Burns, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, argued that "Pravda [the then-influential Soviet newspaper] would write that this was a sign of the collapse of capitalism."

It all seems silly today, but back then it was real stuff. I was an 18-year-old traveling in Japan at the time Nixon devalued the dollar, and I remember wondering how my hard-earned U.S. greenbacks could drop 20% in value overnight!

But it got worse. When I returned from Japan, I found that Nixon - against all odds -had triggered the legislation the Democratic Congress had handed him, and instituted real-time wage and price controls. It took two whole years for the U.S. economy to completely return to private control and market trends.

Today, it's not just about the U.S., as The Economist magazine points out this week. Japan's "Lost Decade" of financial travesty in the late 1980s and early 1990s transformed that nation into something-less-than-happy. Virtually every sector - minus the oil-rich nations armed with Sovereign Wealth - has its own set of challenges. Given the productivity numbers and even with the greed-fueled losses in the U.S. housing market, it seems odd that the American economy would at this point choose to collectively jump off a cliff. If you can completely explain the complexity of today's global economy, I'd like to hear it. Meanwhile, we don't have wage and price controls yet, and we do have an unemployment rate in Indiana (slightly over 4%) that many Hoosier politicians would have killed for a few years ago [Within a few months of this first publishing of this blog, Indiana's unemployment rate jumped to more than 10%, as of this writing it's still around 9%]. The point? Let's go compete.