Here’s the first chapter of a book I started but only got 50% of the way to finishing around 2022/3. I’ve chosen to share for free rather than get it published as a printed book as more people will be able to read it this way. I still believe in the ideas here, but think my focus would now be a little less about the platforms and ‘brand x performance’, and a little more about AI and its implications and applications for brand building which back then were only in their infancy.
This book is essentially about helping people do something that’s appeared from certain angles to be under threat for the last couple of decades: brand building. And doing it at a time and in a place when much in marketing has changed in terms of the communication channels and tactics we now have available: the platform world.
At its heart it’s about trying to answer this question: how do you use advertising to grow a business by building a brand today, a time when the 30s TV spot, the single most powerful and successful advertising format in the history of advertising, is no longer the supremely dominant force it’s been for 50 years. How do you do that now?
People sitting in front of large screens at home, watching scheduled content, funded by advertising placed in and around it, is no longer the dominant way companies build their brands today, if it ever was.
Advertising has probably existed in some form for a few thousand years, and as an organised commercial sector for over a century. Advertising’s TV age lasted just a few decades, from the 1950s to somewhere around the early 2010s. Dominant mediums existed before it, dominant mediums will exist after it. Some are nostalgic for it. But let’s learn from it, not mourn its loss.
We now have an exceptionally wide array of platforms, serving a kaleidoscope of different types of content, accompanied by a mind-boggling number of different ad formats, that are mostly viewed or consumed through much smaller devices and screens, for mostly much shorter slugs of time. (Surprising numbers of people watch YouTube on big screens, but will get to some of that detail later).
This book is about how to get the most out of this array of tools, the platforms, that we now have at our disposal after a couple of decades when the media we use seem to have evolved somewhat faster than in the century or so up to this point. The platforms are still maturing and developing and will continue to evolve, perhaps out of all recognition far into the future. Some of the current crop will die, some will evolve, some new ones will arrive. But the likelihood is that the shift in dominance from one-way channel to multi-sided platform in marketing and advertising is a more or less permanent one that will affect the industry for decades to come, regardless of which big names are in the pecking order.
The platforms have done an extraordinary job in making advertising more accessible than ever before. You no longer need to be a large company with massive promotional budgets to take advantage of it. The barriers to entry are much lower. You no longer need to hire agencies. The platforms are mostly ‘self-serve’ and are becoming ever more automated, and we’ll look at some of the issues this causes as well as the opportunities this provides.
But having a large number of platforms to work with means the landscape has never been more fragmented. Even though the platforms have individually made it phenomenally easy for companies and individuals to access advertising it’s got really really complicated to make it all work together. This book will look at this fragmentation, and try to suggest some simple ways that companies can deal with it.
One reason it felt necessary to write this book now, is that much has been learned and is now known about brand building, and much effort is going into the technological development and application of the platforms as marketing tools, but not much (yet) has been written that brings the two together, that helps people to use the platforms to build brands (as distinct from using them purely to sell products). And, for most of the two decades since the start of the platform age we’re now in, brand building and the platforms themselves have existed in two, somewhat parallel, worlds.
Indeed the two parts of the title of this book can sound like they come from different worlds. The first part, ‘brand building’, can sound like it’s from an older, more established, ‘traditional’ world of marketing. The second part, ‘in the platform world’, might seem like it’s from the newer, more innovative, modern practice of marketing. This convergence of these two worlds in the title is intentional. (No doubt some might think the ‘platform world’ sounds a bit pretentious and others might even think it’s ‘old hat’ given the era we’re in probably started around 2000 – and a bit of me agrees with both these potential criticisms! But if you’re reading this the title has done its job so hopefully we’re all good).
A common way to characterise these two worlds is to talk about there having been a big shift from ‘Madmen to Mathmen’. We all seem to have bought into a related narrative about a golden age of advertising in the mid to late 20th century, led by the glamorous, cool, creative geniuses of the ‘Madmen’ era, and the idea that this has now been replaced in the 21st by the left-brained, data-driven types of the ‘Mathmen’ era. Leaving aside the stereotyping and that any talk of a golden age in any field should always be treated with scepticism, it’s a compelling narrative with a kernel of truth, but it’s ultimately a false dichotomy. Has the proportion of ‘creative’ people in our industry really shrunk? Possibly. But has a significant proportion been replaced by one group with vastly different skills? Of course not.
Anyone who’s read anything by me before will know that those kinds of black & white false dichotomies tend to annoy me, either because they’re just plain wrong, or because they’re in need of more nuance or unification.
But there is some truth in the characterisation of there being a couple of philosophical groupings in the industry today, broadly, ‘creative marketing people’ and ‘marketing technology people’. You can probably characterise these two groups as ‘story-tellers’ and ‘systems thinkers’, but we have them both now, there hasn’t been some generational shift from an era dominated by one to an age dominated by the other.
There is certainly a group more concerned with message and meaning, and a group who are more concerned with the technology and systems used to deliver message and meaning to people. Or to put it another way, there are people who care a bit more about the plumbing and the pipes and people who care a bit more about what flows through the pipes. And the people in these two parallel worlds do tend to operate in silos, and don’t yet spend much, if any, time together.
The marketing people in the ‘story-telling’ camp often look to the academics and researchers setting the ‘scientific’ rules of what works in brand building, often with a grounding and evidence base from the worlds of FMCG/CPG. People in the ‘systems thinkers’ world look more to the tech platforms, to the engineers and developers of the tech platforms and the SaaS companies.
Some of those in the story-telling part of the marketing world, especially those in the creative agencies who are most nostalgic for how things used to be, even deny that it’s possible to ‘build’ brands at all using the digital platforms and channels we now have. Parts of this book will be looking into those claims and providing evidence and examples of how it is of course possible.
In another corner of the marketing forest, the people creating the new technologies are doing so largely blissfully unaware of the academic work around brand building. The ad tech world tends to be closer to the tech bros and tech co’s of the US West Coast. That’s a world that can be remarkably sceptical about advertising, with two key figures in Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who have at different times proven famously outspoken about the value of advertising in growing a business.
The story-tellers tend to think ‘top down’, seeing organisations as holistic entities, that are best described and organised using singular ideas, propositions, visions, missions, purposes, North Stars. Systems-thinkers tend to think bottom up, seeing organisations and their wider ecosystems as machines made up of millions of tiny components. Getting these two differing philosophies to meet in the middle will certainly be a challenge.
But if these people only understood each other and worked together better they could do better things together. A book could only ever be a tiny part of that, but my hope is that this one can help in some small way. And much good could come if only they did.
Another key reason I believe there’s a need for a book like this is that the first iterations of the key platforms we have today were undoubtedly better at direct ‘selling’ than at building brands, but as they evolve, they’re developing into more well-rounded channels, better able to do both, and better appreciated and understood for that ability. I’m purposefully going to avoid this turning into a book into a how-to guide about how to use the platforms to sell products – the world seems to be over-supplied with content like that. No, it’s going to be more about how to grow a brand, not just in the short term, but also over the longer term.
It also seems to be the case that marketers working for bigger companies with more established brands often appear to be more familiar with established marketing principles. But newer, smaller brands, who never knew those rules in the first place, are often freer to use and get to grips with new platforms and tactics as they become available.
So big brands are often strategically sound in their approach, but constrained by the tyranny of ‘what we know has worked for us in the past’ when it comes to using the new tools at their disposal. Smaller, newer brands, who may not know the ‘established’ marketing principles, and who are less constrained by needing firm evidence before trying something new, appear to be able to innovate faster, and so get their heads round how to apply the new tactics quicker.
So all brands and marketers need help: if you know the fundamentals you probably need help learning how to use the new tactics; if you know the tactics you probably need a little help understanding the fundamentals. If you know both – great – either close the book now and go and do something less boring instead or keep going and I’ll try to reinforce all that stuff for you and frame what you know already in as fresh a way as I can.
One of the splits in modern marketing that I’m going to try and do my bit to close with this book, is the one between ‘performance’ and ‘brand’ marketing. It’s really just the modern equivalent of a philosophical divide that has long since been evident in the marketing between people who prioritise or specialise in direct selling or direct marketing and those who specialise in a more indirect kind, call it ‘brand’ advertising if you like.
You can see that split in the work and writing of some of advertising’s foundational thinkers from the 20th century, people like Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising, through to Bill Bernbach who saw advertising as a profoundly artistic, albeit also commercial, endeavour. David Ogilvy sat somewhere in between – as in love with counting response rates to newspaper ads and drawing up ‘scientific’ laws and principles that he observed from this work, as dreaming up quirky characters with eye-patches to advertise men’s shirts.
The modern marketing divide between brand and performance marketing is a problem that means brands are leaving value on the table. It needs to end.
For a certain section of the marketing world, there’s no more triggering a term than ‘performance marketing’. It triggers me too, even from the space connecting the brand and ‘performance’ worlds where I tend to hang out these days. I really should stop using it as much as I do.
It annoys some people because it implies one bit of marketing, its channels, tactics and formats, ‘performs’, and everything else doesn’t. It implies, mostly wrongly, that some stuff can be measured, and that some stuff can’t. It also implies, wrongly, that paying for media based on guaranteed and specific outcomes is smart, but paying for media based on mere predictions of outputs or future outcomes is dumb.
It perpetuates two misperceptions and conflates them: that ‘brand’ marketing activity is too hard to measure, and that anything that’s hard to measure must also be worse performing. You can argue it’s just semantics. But language does matter, so maybe we need to rethink our use of the terms.
The reason I started banging on about this is that the organiser of the excellent Google Firestarters event series, Neil Perkins, saw a blog post by me in 2018 that tried to arm CMO’s and their marketing teams with some arguments and data that they could use to persuade CEOs and CFOs who might be sceptical of the value of brands and brand-building, to invest in their brand. People seemed to find it useful. Mark Ritson recommends it to students of his Mini MBA. It was written in the style of an open letter to all CMO’s everywhere that they could send on to any brand-sceptical leaders in their organisations. It was called ‘Forward to CEO: The most valuable business tool ever invented’ and this book includes an updated and expanded version of it.
When Neil invited me in 2018 to present it at Google Firestarters, he explained to me that usually they have separate events for ’brand’ and ‘performance’ marketers and the two groups never met, but that their next one was going to be unusual as it would be a joint event, and he wanted someone from the ‘brand’ world to share some knowledge about the value of brands and brand building, with an audience who probably rarely heard much about that. I was flattered to be asked but it triggered in me a strong, instinctive reaction that it felt wrong to split marketing people up like this and to feed them a completely different diet of separate information and inspiration.
And if I’m really honest there were probably a number of personal and professional reasons seeing this split irked me. ‘Performance’ people seemed to have positioned themselves more at the cutting edge of modern marketing practice at the expense of the world I was in. They’d nabbed a great word, ‘performance’, which sounded loads better than the concept my part of the advertising world worshipped and rightly still does, ‘effectiveness’. It sounded dynamic and practical. Our word felt slow, heavy, academic and theoretical. Adopting the word ‘performance’ was actually something of a masterstroke for the people engaged in it. And if I’m being really honest, I think this at the time made me feel old, increasingly out of date and in danger of imminent obsolescence.
But wherever you sit on marketing’s huge continuum from ‘brand’ to ‘performance’, the term ‘performance marketing’ itself is, ironically enough, a genius bit of brand marketing. It’s a phrase that brilliantly but unfairly depositions all other marketing tactics and casts doubt on their value.
It instantly depositions everything else in marketing to sound like it’s not about driving performance. Its cousins ‘growth marketing’ and ‘growth hacking’, played a similar trick, taking the word growth and making it their own. Performance people were best mates with people at Google and Meta. They seemed to know their way round the modern marketing jungle better than anyone else.
What started as a niggle about the brand/performance divide has subsequently become a leitmotif in lots of things I’ve written, including articles on balancing the long and short-term in marketing, on evolving the ubiquitous sales funnel and on helping performance-driven brands get off ‘the performance plateau’. It also became a small factor in why I moved from the creative agency world of places like AMV BBDO, Leo Burnett, BBH and adam&eveDDB, to a different world, of the full-funnel marketing services company Jellyfish, where in my day job I’m trying to put the theory into practice.
My frustration at this persistent division inspired me in 2020 to write an essay entitled the ‘Wrong and the short of it’ which talked about the power of combining brand-building & sales activation or ‘performance’ activity. Mark Ritson shared the article on LinkedIn and someone commented that this piece and Ritson’s promotion of it were the foundations of a marketing philosophy called ‘bothism’.
“I re-posted ‘The Wrong & The Short Of It’ on LinkedIn, asking other marketers to read it. And one notable marketer – David Thomas – pointed out that he expected this essay and my subsequent promotion of it would “become known as the development of the Bothism model” (Mark Ritson writing on LinkedIn)
I have a strong feeling that only by ending this persistent division between Brand & Performance will we be able to unlock the full potential of the modern marketing toolkit. And the company I now work for, Jellyfish, is set up to do just this. It bridges all of marketing’s big divides and has all the components of the modern marketing machine sitting happily together under one roof: media & content, technology & creativity, brand & performance, data & ideas, agency & consultancy. Others may possess some of the component parts, but Jellyfish’s structure and culture could give it an advantage.
The marketing and advertising landscape has always been shaped by the dominant media of the day – whether that’s the newspapers of Fleet Street in the 19th century or the TV production companies of Soho in mid to late 20th. Today’s most dominant media are the ad tech platforms – and over the last two decades they’ve been reshaping the ad industry once more.
When I started at AMV BBDO in 2000 there were still Aston Martin’s and Ferrari’s parked in the basement car park, the last visible trace of adland’s glory days. But since around that time, that part of the ad industry has been struggling to adapt to the arrival of the ad tech platforms. One by one the fancy cars disappeared from AMV BBDO’s office car park. So despite being all about delivering growth to its clients, this part of the agency ecosystem has been having trouble delivering growth for itself.
It had been caught unawares by the shifting tides around it, specifically by the arrival of the then new kids on the block, Google and Facebook. New types of agencies had started to crop up to take advantage of these new platforms. Big chunks of their existing clients’ advertising budgets were silently disappearing to these new players and smaller or newer brands were starting to show up less and less frequently in the new business pipeline.
The big agencies of the 20th century got big by being the best at partnering with the big marketers of that era – P&G, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Ford etc. The big names of the 21st century will get big by being the best at partnering with the big platforms and brands of this one. In fact quite a few of the new platforms have themselves been early adopters of Jellyfish as clients – businesses like Google, Netflix, ebay, Uber, Spotify and TikTok.
Despite having huge love and respect for the part of the industry I grew up in, I’m not ashamed to admit to wanting to work in a company that’s growing fast – as fast as many of the platforms it partners.
Media agencies used to buy adspace in channels, and creative agencies used to fill it. But in today’s world, where the platforms are the most common interface between brands and their audiences, advertisers shouldn’t be thinking in those siloes any more. In a platform world, where media and creative content are converging, and where the platforms can help you build your brand, nudge people towards a sale or connect people to it, it’s no longer good enough to think in terms of brand or performance. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.
Whether you want to build your brand with someone so they think of you in the future, want to nudge someone who’s in the market now towards buying your brand, or need to connect your brand with someone who already knows they want it, the platforms have more influence on consumers than ever before. You can use the platforms to reach people wherever they are in the funnel, wherever they are on their ‘journey’, and of course you need to make the brand and communications experience as seamless as possible. So it doesn’t make much sense for brands to use different agencies at each stage of the funnel.
For a long time now, brands have been using digital channels to drive short-term, direct sales activation, focussing their efforts on these platforms on ‘performance’ marketing. But today’s platforms have improved in their ability to build brands over the longer term whilst also driving immediate sales – to deliver both ‘brand’ and ‘performance’. Building brands today requires both an understanding of the fundamentals of how brands grow, as well as an understanding of the digital platforms and tools needed to grow them today. Few marketers have this combination of knowledge and experience, but this book aims to provide it.
This book explores the role of the key platforms and the platform strategies a range of successful brands deploy in their marketing. It includes lessons for brands at every stage of maturity from startup, to scale-up to established brands. It shows examples of the creative campaigns from the most admired modern brands that have been built using the platforms across a range of categories. It looks at some of the best platform native creativity of the last few years and discusses the rise of the creator economy and the impact this is having on advertising. It includes research and data of some of the world’s leading marketing scientists and researchers and practical advice on the best ways to evaluate the performance of campaigns across the platforms. It ends with a look at the future evolution of the platform landscape and how this will affect brands, agencies and their output.
Whilst most marketing books are either grand theories about how marketing works or overly technical manuals about how to use different tactics, this book is tries to be unique in marrying fundamental principles with how to apply them in today’s marketing landscape, helping marketers move beyond just ‘performance’ marketing.
Tom Roach 