Hi. Now that my brain has stopped spinning from the endless PowerPoint presentations (and my feet have stopped bleeding from my adorable but not very practical Burberry heels), let's reflect on this year's MNAMA conference, entitled "Get in the Game: Smart Moves to Optimize Marketing ROI." (Wow, the very title gets my blood pumping faster .... not.)
I'll add some miscellaneous notes at the bottom, but for the moment I'll focus my attention on the morning's keynote speech. A la our beloved Wonkette, I'll try to recap the presentation somewhat line-by-line .... though with considerably less profanity than Wonkette serves up (alas).
The presentation was called Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands and was delivered by John Bowman and Peter Hubbell of the NYC-based ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Clearly they were smart guys, and with impressive credentials to say the least. My stream of consciousness thoughts appear below, along with the speakers' remarks.
They introduce the presentation. Lovemarks .... hm, makes me think of how my mom would refer to hickies back in high school. Interesting. The term is intended to denote brands that inspire "loyalty beyond reason" in their faithful consumers. Affection beyond reason? Hm, definitely reminiscent of high school!
So apparently in this brave new world of post-recession marketing, emotion, rather than reason and analysis, leads to action. Great, I agree completely. But it cracks me up that they then proceed to show myriad charts and analytics to substantiate this point. Gee, practice what you preach? But the graphs plotting the concepts of love and respect on a matrix do have their own amusing charm .... reminds me of marriage counseling or an Aretha Franklin song.
After a lot of great ad clips from brands like Toyota, Cheerios, and T-Mobile, we get to a rather astonishing denouement: people like things that make them feel good. I want to laugh at the obviousness of this statement, but then it occurs to me that perhaps, for many people in the marketing world, it isn't all that obvious. They can think of a thousand points of jargon (ha) and point to mile-high stacks of market research and analytics, but when it comes to understanding what motivates the consumer, I think our industry is often guilty of not seeing the forest for the trees. Marketing, to me, is fundamentally about common sense, and I think a lot of people in our field get paid a lot of money to complicate things .... which gives us all a bad rap. But rant over, back to the presentation.
The gurus sayeth: We should look at consumer relationships not as transactions but as means of involvement, participation, and relationship-building. "Join" has become the buzzword for the new marketing world order. Yeah, okay, I buy this. I think one of the reasons social media has taken off is that people want a dialogue, not some endless advertising soliloquy. But phrases like "participation economy" make me want to cry. The way to galvanize consumers to "join" isn't by replacing sterile phrases like "return on investment" with the equally (in my humble opinion) impersonal notion of "return on involvement." But maybe that's just my affinity for semantics coming out .... we don't like marketing jargon here at Crazy Savvy.
The gurus continue: Effective advertising means telling a story. Yes! Indeed! Brevity is key — the biggest laughs of the morning came when the presenters showed a series of ads, Life Compressed By Stuffit. Brilliant! But I am sick of hearing about "journeys." The presentation ended with advice for the industry. Most of it was great, but I had to laugh when they told us to "boost mystery, sensuality, and intimacy." Hm .... well, I will suppress further commentary here so as to not offend the sensibilities of any delicate reader, but that sounds more apropos for a Viagra ad or a honeymoon to me.
OK. So some random thoughts on the rest of the day:
- It's freezing here at the RiverCenter .... for the love of all things wonderful, can someone turn up the heat? (No. No one did.)
- If I see any more bad stock photography in PowerPoint presentations, I will gouge my eyes out. Although I suppose I should fortify myself for the eventuality ....
- The visual theme and motif for the conference this year was chess. As somewhat (ok, "somewhat" being a massive understatement) of a chess aficionado myself, I found myself wandering around the various booths wanting to sit down and play at one of the chess boards on display. Even the culinary highlight of the day was a piece of dark chocolate in the shape of a chess piece (the queen, natch). Mmmm.
- On the matter of giving presentations: Presenters, please assume your audience is functionally literate. There's no need to read verbatim off your slides. Kthnxbai.
All in all, my snarkery aside, it was a great day — met some wonderful people, gleaned interesting insights, arrived at new business ideas for C/S and our clients. Erin will check in tomorrow with more on the social media aspects of the day, so stay tuned!
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