EOW Thought: Opposites Attract

Greetings loyal subscribers.

First, some house-keeping:

• We have our first sponsor! Jason Schulweis, the illustrious CRO of mindbodygreen, has graciously plunked down a whopping $1.20 to be our first ever sponsor. Jason is more than just a media and ad sales bad boi; he’s an all-around great guy and great hang. Hit up Jason if you rep a wellness brand and are trying to reach a kick-ass audience with him and MBG.

• My friend Kevin told me yesterday, “I like what you’re saying, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” At the very least, this is how I hope you all feel.

If you’d like to sponsor the next newsletter (release TBD), the cost has gone up (after all, we’re living in Joe Biden’s America and the interest rates are now at 22 years high, so only feels right). $1.40 will get you in front of my closest family and LinkedIn friends. Serious and non-serious inquires, only and forever.

EOW thought

A few years ago I realized something about the different clients I worked with.

When I would work with a digital-first brand, they’d primarily want to explore traditional media channels in their advertising campaigns.

Which made sense - for as direct-to-consumer as they were, they couldn’t be felt, couldn’t be touched, and often didn’t have a store someone could enter into.

Their advertising could then be a memorable stand-in for the brand’s physical personality and tone, giving life to something that merely lived on a customer’s phone or laptop screen or checkout cart.

On the flip side, older, more traditional brands wanted a digital future. Enough of the old world; give us Facebook (and YouTube, and mobile, and CTV, and podcasts, and eventually TikTok) or give us death.

It became a guiding principle for me - at their core, brands want marketing to solve what they can’t have. Digital wants traditional, and traditional wants digital. It was a satisfying, if not often correct, answer to that initial brief on how to fuel growth: open up a brand’s world to a new world where they are deficient, and pull them through it.

A similar line of thinking came up on a recent episode of The Town. The head of marketing of Warner Brothers Studios said that the goal of Barbie’s marketing partnerships (shit, we’re bringing her up again!) was to make “the familiar unfamiliar.”

That struck a chord. Think of the best marketing campaigns of the last few years. Barbie’s partnerships obviously come to mind, out of recency bias, mashing up childhood memories with modern adulting activations.

Heinz too. There’s been 1,000 ways for them to express themselves. But what if AI took a stab at it? What if their own customers did? It would result in weird, new pictures yet familiar portraits of the Heinz bottle. An unexpected way to share familiar memories.

Making the unfamiliar, familiar is also the classic first brand campaign brief for start-up brands. It results in going to the expected category places to revel in their credibility, but shaking their trees to feel new.

It’s hard to avoid category tropes when you’re a new brand, and even harder to disrupt them, but a baseline of knowing who the fuck a brand or company is is often required to even be in a position to think of them as a challenger.

Traditional wants digital, digital wants traditional.

Make the familiar unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar familiar.

What’s the role of marketing?

The question really is - what do you not have?

Identify it, and run towards that.

I’ll be thinkin of you this weekend.

Danny