sponsored by Integrate
Rory Sutherland, vice chairman at Ogilvy UK, opened the Ignite conference urging B2B marketers to step away from rational thinking and proven outcomes.
He asked, is our need to be quantifiable preventing us from taking risks? “A huge amount of B2B success is from random luck,” he said.
“We’re obsessed with quantifying the value of advertising. The attempt to quantify it undermines it.”
Rory underlined the importance of taking chances that can’t be measured. “If you don’t do things that expose you to positive asymmetric outcomes, you won’t get lucky. We should use marketing to inform what we do, not decide what we do.”
Warning against the ‘highly rational’ approach to marketing, Rory advised against relying too heavily on data to make creative decisions.
“Efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing,” he said.
Doug Kessler spoke about how to get great work past your stakeholders.
“When I look at work that inspires me, I used to think about craft and execution.
"Now I think about how they created the conditions to get this work approved.”
Most marketers are talented, committed people with great ideas, Doug said, but 90% of marketing is shite.
Why is safe, mediocre work so much easier to get approved? Because we try to do something special and flop 5% of the time, and the other 95% of the time we don’t even go for it.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Marketing's job is to get the ideas made. So what happens between the ideas and the market? If you want to get innovative, risky work endorsed by your stakeholders, you’ve got to give them what they want.
But marketing’s job is to make them want the right things. “Put as much work into stakeholder alignment as the work itself,” Doug said.
“Choose your stakeholders carefully." Doug advised finding a champion, one senior person you can run your ideas by.
"Market your successes," he said, "But be warned you might lose your credibility. Be prepared to get fired or quit.”
