Podcast: Four Laws to Steal Their Attention
We sat down with Dallin Nead, the podcast host of VISIONARIES, where he explores different stories and strategies of the most visionary people and how they inspire change.
What is a visionary, you might ask? Well, Nead doesn’t think you have to be Albert Einstein or Nicola Tesla to fit the bill. He’s set on changing the tone around the term “visionary” to begin with, by challenging listeners to think of themselves as visionaries and how that plays out in their lives. It’s everyday people, he says, who are helping create a world that works to benefit everyone.
“I want us to all gather around this identity and feel like we can be empowered to build this future for ourselves the way that we see it,” says Nead.
In the episode Level Up Your Branding To Make Your Audience Care, he interviews our founder, Tom Geary, to get at the heart of what really connects people to marketing work. What is it that catches their eye? Is it more than just good design and clever writing?
Together, they covered off on the four laws that can really make or break good advertising.
The four laws to connect your audience to your marketing work. Image Source: Pixabay
THE FIRST LAW: Connect Emotionally, Immediately
Nobody is ever looking forward to being advertised to, even if they’re looking for a product in your category. Informed, sure. Advertised to? Not exactly.
In fact, people are less receptive to advertising now more than ever. Even if they don't have an AdBlock extension, years of internet use have trained us all to filter out banner ads and five-second YouTube bumpers, and we all walk past most physical advertising without a second glance.
But even if your audience is actively looking for data-driven and informative advertising, why are they going to look at yours and not someone else's first?
If you're not thinking about connecting emotionally, you're not thinking about advertising to humans. Leading with pure data might be good for optimizing for an algorithm, and that certainly may be a useful target market a few years down the line – but right now it isn't going to move the needle.
School of Thought founder Tom Geary and Visionaries podcast guru Dallin Nead get into why it's always essential to connect emotionally with your audience.
Your data or brand proposition can be clear and convincing enough to convert anyone who lays eyes on it, but in this supersaturated advertising market the key is getting people to lay eyes on it in the first place.
Now, there are a zillion ways to connect emotionally. It can be using a visual language that runs counter to everyone else in the market sector, using sly humor to get people to do a double-take and give your ad a second look. It could even visually shove the data in your audience's face with a slick animation that provides a visual reference for something that's usually abstract. It all depends on the goal of your brand.
The notion to be arresting and connect emotionally is not restrictive. It’s just the opposite: it frees you to focus on what makes your brand unique and how that connects back to your audience.
How can you tell if you’re standing apart from the crowd, though, or blending into the background?
THE SECOND LAW: Don't Settle for Vanilla
First off, this isn't a knock against vanilla ice cream. There's a reason why it's the default ice cream—it’s good ice cream—but its best work is done when used as a launchpad and not the main event.
Think: butter pecan, cinnamon, cookie dough, etc. (You’re welcome, ice cream lobby.)
If everybody on your team is giving your idea a B+ grade then it's probably not going to stick out enough to make an impression. Plenty of media is focus-tested to work across multiple demographics and target markets, but at what cost?
Tom offers insight into why pleasing everyone in the boardroom is often a worse idea than it sounds.
Trying to make your ad work for everybody is a recipe to work on an unmemorable level. Sure, everybody's pleased by it, but who’s going to be thinking about it on their commute home, or when they make a purchasing decision?
So, when every shop is wall-to-wall vanilla ice cream, selling chocolate, mint chip or unicorn flavor is an incredible competitive advantage.
THE THIRD LAW: Going With The Trend is Poison
Remember the ads during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: “We’re all in this together”?
You might think that every single company in Silicon Valley was reading from the same playbook, and you'd be right. If you asked a selection of players in the B2B sector how they felt about marketing during this time, you’d find people were truly scared to deviate from the norm.
Tom explains why using the most popular and well-loved typeface and Silicon Valley right now is a brilliant way to shoot your startup in the foot.
Plenty of articles captured that sentiment precisely. One parody ad focused on the overuse of the phrase ‘in these uncertain times’ to show just how conformist advertising felt at the time. At the time of writing, it has 1.8M views.
But refusing to break from the pack isn’t just shooting yourself in the foot. It is, in effect, the opposite of advertising.
Your brand has been consumed by everyone else's brand.
THE FOURTH LAW – Don’t Imitate. Innovate.
While it can be tempting to look at what worked for your competitors and expect it to work for you, particularly in the business-to-business market where people rarely color outside the lines, that's limiting what you can learn from them.
When has a campaign set itself apart enough to be truly great? Tom offers his insight on the subject.
There's a quote widely attributed to Pablo Picasso that "good artists borrow, great artists steal." You don't want to reinvent the wheel entirely, but you can’t settle for being another imitator just borrowing from the playbook of the already successful.
We all know Open Sans is a way overused font, so if you do start to go in the way of an Open Sans type, it better be strategic. It would do you good to go back to the root of its appeal and work from there to find something original again. Because if it doesn't look original, you haven't stolen anything—just become an imitator.
In Summary:
Ultimately, somebody is going to break the mold. They always do. The question is who will do it first?
Will it be a startup that springs into existence more quickly and cheaply than ever before with fewer levels of bureaucracy in the way, or a rival titan you took for granted that learns to operate like a startup and do things faster and with more money behind them.
Case in point: Budweiser hard seltzer. Everybody knows the name of the beer, but why they showed up late to the seltzer game (or at all) is a cringe-worthy topic. Even though it was the first large beer brand to get into hard seltzer, they were so late to the market it felt prehistoric. Whether it was a fear of taking risks or the slow confidence they could pivot any time they wanted, the end result made plenty of onlookers wince.
The takeaway? The drive to be creative and stand out with how you communicate your product advantages and your brand story is like offering up a trailer for a movie instead of just picking a title based on the DVD cover. Sure, it’s a pretty piece of data that pulls the viewer in, but it’s not the thing that’s going to last in the user’s mind.
It’s easy to discount how important it is to provide lasting value and recognition in your marketing, but it may be the one thing that gets you on the map.
If you can't communicate what’s between those back and cover slips, you can't sell a damn thing.