Issue No. 504 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting quotes branding author Jeff Rosenblum: “When every brand is trying to be emotional, sometimes the bravest thing a brand can do is be boring.” (Wait! What…?) And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for my 2021 Top-10 Books and Book-of-the-Year.
Exponential author, Jeff Rosenblum, says that "the greatest advertisement of all time” was the iPod billboard, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”
Move From Interrupting to Empowering Customers
Oh, my! What’s not to like about an author who includes his father’s endorsement in his new book? (Today, Exponential remains at “#1 New Release in Marketing and Consumer Behavior” on Amazon—more than a week after it was released.) Jeff Rosenblum’s father writes:
“I thought my son was a complete knucklehead who couldn’t construct a sentence, but this book is legitimately good. He said if I write a recommendation, he’ll buy me lunch. So, get this book.” (Neil Rosenblum, author’s father and market research teacher)
Author Jeff Rosenblum attacks his topic like a James Bond villain! His premise in Exponential: you can “transform your brand by empowering instead of interrupting.”
And speaking of James Bond, numerous chapters—including Chapters 1, 3, and 8—almost explode off the page with heart-beating action (blood and more blood!). But his literary device has a point (he admits to a bait-and-switch). “We began with a gory story about how I nearly severed a kid’s thumb. From here on, I promise that the blood spilled will be more metaphorical than literal. But the disruptions to the status quo will be no less dramatic.”
Who should read this book?
• Marketing, PR, and Fundraising team members
• Savvy CEOs (who intuitively have recognized the insanity of their same old/same old marketing blunders and blah/blah/blah messaging)
• Board members (The book will shock you! The author says that those in the Gen Z age bracket “ignore the vast majority of TV advertisements.”)
• Consumers (if you want confirmation about the dismal state of advertising and marketing today)
Jeff Rosenblum socks-it-to-you:
• “Brands stand naked in front of their consumers. They are now defined by their behavior, not their messaging.”
• “Advertising is shifting from technology-fueled messages that interrupt the consumer journey to data-connected content that carries people through the consumer journey.”
• “After many years of grinding that builds an army of evangelists, most don’t realize that a different set of processes will be needed when exponential growth kicks in.”
Before your next marketing team meeting delivers the worst of group-think recommendations, post this on your wall: “This new type of advertising doesn’t need to be a Patagonia-inspired public service initiative promising to save the world. While those efforts are great, most people don’t wake up in the morning expecting brands to hug the trees and save the manatees. They simply want their own lives improved, one small step at a time.”
To be clear, Rosenblum affirms, “Advertising is not dead.” But…the current dead end path of advertising is “institutional insanity.” He’s stumped why more people in the ad industry don’t understand the new path: empowering the consumer. “So they keep doing the same old things—variations on interruptive ads—with results that get worse and worse.”
Instead, check out the Transport for London videos, such as “WhoDunnIt.” The author notes the clever attention-grabber line—repeated in the series of videos: “This is an awareness test.” Click here for the scene—reminiscent of an Agatha Christie mystery.
WHO DUNNIT? Test your awareness competencies with this very clever two-minute ad from London Transport. Click here.
The author spotlights best and worst advertising practices. Alarming—but delicious reading!
• Department store guru John Wanamaker’s quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” (Rosenblum’s research puts that figure at 90 percent wasted! Yikes!)
• Early in his agency career, Rosenblum “became obsessed with using data to tell stories to help my clients take action. I turned the walls of our office into boards that looked like a scene in a TV police show.”
• How an empowerment approach conceived of a rap contest for a motorcycle client that turned the tables on who pays who—and drew hundreds of thousands to the website. (Did you know Michael Jordan owned a motorcycle racing team?)
• Why the upcoming Super Bowl ad spend-a-thon is pure insanity—and how Jeep’s Groundhog Day commercial, starring Bill Murray, won high marks. Yet (gulp!) when wanting to buy a Jeep, the author discovered that Jeep’s website “felt completely disconnected from the hoopla” of the commercial. View the video here.
View Jeep’s Groundhog Day commercial starring Bill Murray (1-minute).
When COVID triggered a recession in the spring of 2020, learn why discount shoppers (those who thrive on Sale! Sale! Sale!), ultimately “abandoned retailers that they didn’t feel emotionally connected to, and why J. Crew had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. While many may blame that outcome on the pandemic, other retailers like Restoration Hardware, who built their entire models around empowerment, doubled their market cap during the same period.”
Hmmm. Perhaps members and attenders at your own church have demonstrated similar behaviors—due to little, if any, emotional connection before COVID. So next weekend perhaps, they will get their coffee and donuts—and check off the box, “I Attended Church Today!” from the comfort of their Lazy-Boys.
Note: This “empowerment” insight is not just more mumble/jumble ad copy rhetoric. After the publisher of The Wall Street Journal penned his annual “Report to Our Readers” message, I read four letters to the editor in the Jan. 22 print edition—oozing with love and appreciation for their Monday to Saturday reading rituals. Stunning!
You will resonate with Rosenblum’s brutal analysis of advertising interruptions. “Even today, I’m amazed at how many people in my industry act as if folks are still patiently sitting through TV commercials, admiring the flashy banner ads on their laptops, or watching closely as a YouTube pre-roll delays the video they really want to see. This kind of institutional insanity in corporate America is based on faith in a reach-and-frequency model, which the advertising industry has spent decades perfecting.”
He adds, “It’s a numbers game where the score is kept by how many people you can reach and how frequently you can interrupt them with a brand message.” Then this: “Marketers keep making ads, and the audience keeps running away.”
So he pushes back: “…who feels good about being interrupted?” He skewers the financial services industry—you’ll endure about 1,000 digital ads from them! He admits, “the data proves that the approach gets some results, but I equate it to trying to kill a grizzly bear with a BB gun.” (I’m guessing PETA is not one of his clients!)
If I were still a CEO today, I’d bring four books and four Chick-fil-A gift cards to my next weekly meeting and inspire four people to each report on a book over the next four weeks. ("Please contrast and compare.") To add a little Hoopla! (aka "bribe")—I might create a Super Bowl theme and ask everyone to rate the TV ads and the company’s approach: Interruptions or Empowerment? The four books:
[ ] Exponential: Transform Your Brand by Empowering Instead of Interrupting, by Jeff Rosenblum (order from Amazon)
[ ] Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers (read my review)
[ ] Brain Rules for Work (read my review and also Chapter 3 of Exponential, “This Is Your Brain on Advertising”)
[ ] From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers...into Lifelong Fans (read my review)
[ ] Bonus Book! The Care and Feeding of Ideas, by Bill Backer. Last year, Paul Palmer recommended this 1993 book by the creative mind behind the Coca-Cola commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” (Sorry…that earworm is now stuck in your head!)
There is SO much more in Rosenblum's book, but you'll have to read it. Learn why the classic "beer test" interviewing technique is misguided. How to spot people who pad their resumes by asking Elon Musk's interview question. And...how "stack ranking" almost destroyed Microsoft.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Exponential: Transform Your Brand by Empowering Instead of Interrupting, by Jeff Rosenblum. And thanks to Fortier PR and McGraw Hill for sending me a review copy.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) The author writes, “The key to exponential growth is actually being great, not saying you’re great. Behavior over messaging. Authenticity over image.” So…do we believe our own press releases? Are we truly empowering our clients and customers—or are we incessantly interrupting them and not blessing them?
2) Rosenblum notes, “When every brand is trying to be emotional, sometimes the bravest thing a brand can do is be boring.” (Wait! What…?) He adds, “Are you using your time and talent to create a modern version of spam, or are you creating content that people would actually go out of their way to enjoy?” OK…let’s confront the brutal facts of our current advertising and marketing strategy and tactics.
Great Idea from the Operations Bucket! “Every Friday morning with coffee, host a Bagels & Bureaucracy stand-up meeting. Award Starbucks gift cards to the best ideas for ruthlessly eliminating bureaucracy in your organization!” Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.
Buckets Countdown:
The Operations Bucket (#17) Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips from John Pearson, with commentary by Jason Pearson (2nd Edition, 2018) - Order from Amazon.
The Operations Bucket Core Competency: “We affirm the high and noble calling of management and the spiritual gift of administration. We reject the fallacy that leaders lead and managers manage. We relentlessly pursue both effective and efficient operational solutions to organizational challenges. We are experts at ruthlessly eliminating costly bureaucracy that impedes results. We are yes men and women!”
Bagels & Bureaucracy: Great Idea from the Operations Bucket! “Every Friday morning with coffee, host a Bagels & Bureaucracy stand-up meeting. Award Starbucks gift cards to the best ideas for ruthlessly eliminating bureaucracy in your organization!”
Visit the Operations Bucket to read why Olan Hendrix writes, "Leaders must learn to manage, and managers must learn to lead.” Plus, check out the book recommendations including this WW2 thriller, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victor (watch for the April 22, 2022, movie and view the trailer here).
The 20 management buckets are perfect content for the lifelong learning segment in your weekly staff meetings (you do have weekly staff meetings, right?). Visit the 20 buckets webpage here.
JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Whew! The advertising world is changing. If your marketing team is under pressure—but still using worn-out strategies, we can help. Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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