Pop culture jester

Since moving to the brand side this time last year, I’ve taken the opportunity to read some of the foundational texts around marketing effectiveness. Like an evangelist who studies Buddhism or Islam, I think it’s useful to continue to understand why you believe what you believe.

Included in there has been Eat Your Greens, Ogilvy on Advertising, How Not to Plan, A Technique For Producing Ideas, and Why Does The Pedlar Sing.

I just finished the latter and no summary would do it justice; I highly recommend reading it if for nothing but the history of the effectiveness canon. But I distilled it down to tweet form like this: it’s better to be distinctive and entertaining than differentiated or dogmatic about a set purpose/ message/ strategy/ idea.

Feldwick offers a nuanced take on the Byron Sharp/ Jenni Romaniuk/ Binet & Field school of fame: brand building as showmanship. He draws heavily from PT Barnum’s ability to find himself in the spotlight and although he says that…

“There is no simple recipe for creating fame, nor can it be done in a purely calculating or clinical way; it needs the energy, imagination, risk taking, and shameless braggadocio that street entertainers and charlatans have relied on in all age.”

… he offers guidelines for developing fame through showmanship:

• Maintain intrinsic appeal (start with product truths)
• Reach mass audiences (create scale)
• Nurture distinctive assets (be consistently recognizable as yourself)
• Enable and encourage social diffusion (give people something to talk about)

(Parentheses mine)

It’s hard to look at that list in September 2021 and not think of Lil Nas X. Like PT Barnum 150 years before, Lil Nas X is master of getting attention.

It’s important to note that this does not mean he’s a phony. As Feldwick puts it, “An honest man who thus arrests public attention will be called a humbug, but he is not a swindler or an impostor.”

But as talented as he is as a musician, his biggest talent is getting himself attention that creates conversation, following Feldwick’s showmanship playbook:

“Old Town Road” caused controversy when it topped the country charts because it “wasn’t country enough.”

He created a Satan-themed, unlicensed Nikes that got him sued but left him to benefit from the Barbra Streisand Effect.

Then, he feigned outrage when Tony Hawk and Liquid Death created a skateboard deck with Tony’s blood, only to later reveal that he was in on the stunt.

His recent album launch campaign was half inspired by celebrity pregnancy, half by activism-style OOH.

And he’s invited fans to co-create with him with moments like this.

(For more, check GQ’s article on the Montero launch )

All of his comms have featured his distinctive assets — his face, his body, his name, his voice — and all of them have grown his stage.

It’s temping to say all brands should do this. To creatives like my friend Aisha Hakim, who have more ideas killed in a week than most of us have in a year, it’s clear what gets in our way.

A lot of us enter the world of marketing starry-eyed and feel the shine dim as we deal with timelines and budgets and org charts and process. The operational piping that makes marketing possible is also what chokes it nearly to death.

Marketing genius or not, it’s effective as hell, and that’s what we should focus on.

My return to studying some effectiveness classics has reminded me that we need people to remember us 1st, and deliver a USP maybe 35th.

As much as we (brand marketing folks) want to believe people buy rationally, probably because we want to believe it about ourselves, it’s not the case. Brands are necessarily irrational. They work as shorthands that help us not have to think too hard about which detergent or car to buy (new car purchases might be the least rational one we make — the best thing to do is buy a two-year-old car that’s already seen the steepest depreciation drop — but 17 million Americans do it every year).

While we might not all feel able to play the part of the nimble jester of pop culture, as Lil Nas X does, we can step outside of what our logic-seeking minds tell us and follow what simply works.