The Wrong Questions

The coffee is tired, too

As a marketing and advertising consultant with access to proprietary data and analytics, I get asked any number of questions by our clients on optimal creative practices. I'm always happy to help, and always do what I can to answer the question directly... but the answers rarely close the matter. I'd like to take some time to discuss why, and how to get to a place where the questions are likely to drive to a better conclusion.

The simplest stumbling block is when a client becomes fixated on the answer to questions that only have, at best, temporary answers. These include points like optimal dayparting, mobile formatting, subject line conventions, call to action language, and so on. Even when you actually have a good answer to one of these fishing expeditions, it rarely satisfies, especially since a perceptive client will understand that you are answering the point with something like frustration.

But it goes beyond the understanding that tactics will need to be checked, or might evolve over time. Moreover, it's the stratification of winners or losers, as if the march of a campaign is always a smooth ramp upward.

Because, well, it never works that way.

What happens instead is a matter of stops and starts, with gains punctuated by drops, based around seasonality, the rise and fall of certain practices, and how other, outside influences might impact your marketing channel.

There are optimal practices, and winning tactics... but there are no golden calfs, no rules that can never be broken, no tests that are definitive and closed. Even the most basic points, such as making sure there is a call to action or fast access in a scan or preview mode, might become losers later. But there are orders of priority in regards to testing, and moves that are unlikely to be your best or most pressing point to test.

That's where the comprehensive nature of data and analysis kicks in and becomes meaningful. Typical marketing and ad pros usually have visibility into just how their individual handful of campaigns did in the real world, and even in the best and most rigorous of cases, they tend to tap out after a dozen or so cells in a calendar year. After all, you are in the business to provoke better engagement, rather than run a response lab as a social experiment.

But if you are at the wheel of an adtech provider that serves multiple clients, hopefully with a wide number of sub-brands?Well, that's when the visibility becomes incredibly useful, and if you are very fortunate, inspirational on a cross-category basis. (I've been fortunate enough to be in that position for over 15 years now, at four different gigs, and it never fails to make me seem, well, far smarter than I actually am.)

So the right question isn't what specific creative practice is optimal, at this time and in this execution. Rather, it's what's new to the field in the last two to four business quarters, even if it's not 100% germane to what you are trying to promote right now.... because that can, and will, inspire the next breakthrough. Preferably in a clean test cell, which will hopefully convince some future client to test something

And if we wind up with a client that wants to just do what they do, regardless of our recommendations?

Well, that is valuable as well, if only to continue to give us a control against the likely better idea...

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