Brands need to act faster than ever, but that doesn’t mean they can neglect the tried-and-true of slow-burn marketing.
Take Adobe. It devotes almost three quarters of its marketing spending to digital, but that doesn’t mean it’s neglected the need to focus on the long-term.
“To go on the offensive, to create value instead of protecting value, you need to adopt the three O’s mindset: open-minded, optimistic and opportunistic,” said Karl Isaac, director of brand strategy at Adobe, during Digiday’s recent Agency Innovation Camp.
Isaac compares this approach to the way fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle groups operate. Fast-twitch stunts are real-time experiments that may not even work. “If it sucks, it’s over before you know it,” he said. As an example, Isaac pointed to Adobe’s Eames chair hackathon, which allowed creative voices to engage with the brand. The entire project only took Adobe around 10 days from conception to launch.
Slow-twitch marketing focuses on the big picture, and ultimately sets the structure for longer-term brand-development efforts, like Adobe’s “Metrics Not Myths” campaign to promote the rebrand of the Adobe Marketing Cloud product. The campaign, while funny and provocative, also drew upon data and analysis to support its claims and focused on how the product would appeal to marketers.
For Isaac, brands need to intertwine both fast-twitch and slow-twitch mentalities in order to survive today.
See Isaac’s full presentation in the video below.
Case Study: Offensive Branding at Adobe from Digiday on Vimeo.
Image via Shutterstock
More in Marketing
Advertising’s new ‘universal language’ for AI agents sparks old debates about power and openness
The long search for order in advertising’s AI future.
Walmart deepens relationship with OnePay, a one-stop finance app it helped create
Walmart-backed fintech firm OnePay this year has added features that further expand its relationship with Walmart and its customers.
How creators are becoming their own networks with Night agency’s David Huntzinger
David Huntzinger of Night says the creator economy is reaching an inflection point, as YouTube experiments with dynamic ads and brands like Blue Apron take influencer marketing in-house.