You may know I love cycling, I’m a MAMIL (middle aged man in lycra)
To the eternal dismay of the people I live with, I also watch it
Tell you what, it’s in a bit of a golden age
After years of the likes of Team Sky grinding other teams down
With one boring strategy.
Death Star teams winning through a repeated formula
There’s a new breed of racer now who wins with panache
You don’t know what they’ll do next
They can win in all sorts of situations
And the old-style big teams can’t beat them because they can only win one way
To misquote Princess Leia
The more they tighten their grip, the more races slip through their fingers
It’s like that for brands and agencies now
The more they tighten their grip, the more buyers slip through their fingers
Now it’s getting harder and bludgeon folks with pre-tested TV
We need more acts, less ads to avoid being filtered out
As PR content, experience and digital become core, not an afterthought
Brands need an in-house writer’s room more than an in house studio
The dinosaurs look at the likes of Liquid Death
And think, yeah, it’s easy when you’re a challenger
Yet the only thing more obvious than agencies quoting Bryon Sharpe
Is quoting Nike, who’ve worked this way for years
It’s why you should take the likes of the IPA databank with a pinch of salt
It’s aggregates average – and follows the agenda of ‘ads not acts’.
When there's never been a better time to find your voice, tell your story
Let the Death Star organisations still build marketing plans like it was the 80s
Let behemoth agencies develop crafted messaged no one cares about
Be one of the rebel strategists
In world where the Empire is trying to tighten its grip
All-rounders as good at PR as they are at broadcast
Good enough at performance AND brand to not need to reinforce a divide
With creative ideas ‘creatives’ hiding behind a mac can’t have
Media ideas media folks obsessed with reach and frequency miss
Less bothered about long term v short term
Obsessed with removing what’s in the way for clients
I’ve seen a lot of brands (bland) agencies
Still with a weird sense of lead agency entitlement
Who look down on the ‘not above the line’ folks
Trying to develop digital first, social work like they do 30 second commercials
They are easy to upstage, by simply just starting with real life, not just data
Real culture, not the second-hand stuff in social listening
Talking to real people, not AI
You don’t have to be an ethnographer, just a human
Able to have ideas people would actually thank you for making
Caring about real people, not personas
So, if you’re not an all-round planner, get some broader skills quick
Get more interesting work by being interested
Be more Rebel, less Empire
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