Mark Duffy has written the Copyranter blog for 12 years and is a freelancing copywriter with 25-plus years of experience. His hockey wrist shot is better than yours.
The scene: You’re a robotic fly on the wall inside a conference room of a Flatiron District marketing firm on a recent afternoon as two digital marketing experts (and Martin, an intern) try to hammer out new strategies for their biggest client.
SETH: OK, we need to get way out in front of everybody else. What’s the new [makes air quotes], “new” thing? What’s after AI, AR, VR, 3-D, 360? That’s where we need to be.
MELISSA: Chip implants?
SETH: Interesting. Martin! Start a list.
MELISSA: Eventually, they’ll be the norm. Hopefully, it’ll be government mandated. When people walk by a billboard or, say, sit on public transportation or visit a website, custom ads could be beamed directly to their brains.
SETH: Shit, yeah! But that seems a bit … too far out in front. What else is new-new?
MELISSA: Roombas are looking like a good option for collecting hidden consumer data. Maybe we should conference with iRobot?
SETH: Hmm, OK. But let’s keep that on the D-L.
MELISSA: We definitely need to get their cognitive marketing ramped up.
SETH: Yes, that’s hot! Refresh my memory. What is it again, exactly?
MELISSA: Well, Boomtrain says it’s using the brain’s ability to think about itself as a way to form a connection with a customer.
MARTIN: Uh, I thought it was just marketing software that thinks for itself, like AI, kinda.
SETH: But then what would [client name redacted] need us for? Write it down anyway, with a big asterisk.
MELISSA: Checking my notes … last week, we told [client name redacted] that they needed to pivot to more people-based marketing and interconnect it with the UGC storytelling — sorry — story-doing content the ad agency team is currently collaboratively curating with [client name redacted]’s PR people and that hot Australian director.
SETH: Get all of that, Martin?
MARTIN: Yes, and checking my notes, Seth, you also told [client name redacted] that we would crunch user data and identity-map connected customers … ?
SETH: Really? Why did I say that? Do we do that? Can we do that?
MELISSA: We don’t. We could. …
SETH: Well! All I know is we’ve got to get more of their customers to join more conversations, and then we need to change all the conversations to get maximum on-boarding and convert more of them to QLs. How the fuck are we gonna do that?
MELISSA: I think we need to get their new DMP all up in their customers so that we know everything, all the time, immediately.
SETH: Yes! We need more fast data! Millisecond marketing! Then, we can create fresher and more scalable paint-by-data numbers portraits of all their customers and make them all contextual and globally accessible for real-time decision making. Does [client name redacted]’s cloud connect with consumers across the entire customer journey?
MELISSA: No, not even close, but please remember, Seth, [client name redacted] now calls it their “Marketing Stratocumulus®.”
SETH: OK, that’s a bit much. But we do need realer real-time results. Solutions?
MELISSA: We need to get more H2H interactions to their touch points, even if it’s M2H [Copyranter: “M” stands for “Machine”] posing as H2H.
SETH: Which brings us back to our people-based marketing content project. I think it’s gonna light up [client name redacted]’s dashboards like Times fucking Square.
MARTIN: Totally spitballing here, but I read that running a national TV spot one time is still the biggest bang for your buck.
SETH: Spare us your ancient school sound bites, Martin. How old are you?
MARTIN: It was in Ad Age. …
SETH: Ad Age is dead.
MARTIN: Coke’s CMO said it. …
SETH: Coke is dead. Do you drink Coke? I don’t. Nobody in my after-work squad drinks Coke. I drink peach Ghost Pee. You both should be drinking Ghost Pee. It’s organic. It’s Canadian. It’s now-er than now. Martin, go get three bottles from the fridge. What time is it in Australia?
More in Marketing
How Bluesky hopes to win over publishers (and users)
Bluesky courts publishers with a simple pitch: trust and traffic.
Who are the winners and losers of Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG?
While the deal’s official close is still a long way off and there may be regulatory hurdles to clear before the acquisition is complete, it’s still worth charting out who the winners and losers may be.
Holding pattern: Omnicom, IPG and the deal that’s leaving marketers on edge
How Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG keeps marketers guessing.