Champagne Strategy

Brain hurt scale 4/10. Jonathan Rolley is an agency owner who specializes in buying media and executing campaigns for brands who actually want a measured response. Sounds crazy I know. But instead of optimizing for vanity metrics like impressions, reach, brand awareness, brand consideration, brand preference and even salience. He's more concerned about whether it resulted in purchases (the respons...

Brain hurt scale 6/10. Did you know? Elisa and her firm predicted the results of the last Australian federal election weeks before it happened? And this wasn't an isolated incident.  Contrary to popular perception, predicting future market behavior is possible. So why don't more organizations do it? This question and many more about the mysterious new wave of the market research world will be...

Brain-hurt scale 9/10 - Brand tracking. You just track awareness and some other association or brand dimensions over time and if they all increase relative to your competitors, your brand wins, right?  The famous brand tracking companies that all famous agencies use are all highly reputable, use robust measurement methodologies and wouldn't lie to our faces, would they? The more brand awarene...

Brain-hurt scale 10/10 - Marketing Mix Modelling or MMM for short is, to paraphrase Zoolander, 'So Hot Right Now'. It seems every day I see another firm pop up with an AI, ML-powered MMM product that claims to be the silver bullet that will fix our iOS14-induced digital attribution void and transport us back to measurement nirvana. But, as you'll find out by listening to this episode, Caveat Empto...

Brain-hurt scale = 9/10. Every day, we hear about new studies in the field of marketing and growth. Industry whitepapers. Academic theories. This law. That law. An industry group finds TV is better than Facebook. The next week, another group finds the exact opposite. Byron vs Binet. Galloway vs Gary V. This study vs that study. It's exhausting, now to sit here and even write about it. Unfortun...

Brain-hurt scale = 6/10. If you work in the world of advertising or media, especially in Australia or the UK, I'd be surprised if you haven't heard of Karen Nelson Field.  Fresh from an escapade sipping rose and snacking on caviar on the French Riviera, we’re actually not talking to her about attention & advertising measurement. Sorry to disappoint. But, that's been covered in depth alrea...

Brain-hurt scale = 7/10. Patrick Campbell's story is fascinating. From rural Wisconsin to the NSA and then bootstrapping a tech company to a recent $200m sale. Sounds crazy until you learn how his mind works and the sharp business intellect that's feeding success.  In a world of social media influencers and industry commentator journalists, we can easily listen to conflicted advice. The truth...

Brain-hurt scale = 5/10. When was the last time you saw a startup's GTM strategy include sales prospecting cold calls? Pretty much never. Most early-stage startups and shy businesses skip this crucial step. Instead preferencing an introverted, passive, direct response style approach. Which includes ads on digital channels targeting in-market buyers. In this episode, you'll find out why thi...

Brain-hurt scale = 5/10. The microphone is reversed John sprawled on a green sofa, which burns your retinas.  They talk and Tim extracts Viral cat videos on TikTok. Cake decoration. Channel envy. Visual bias. The principal agent problem and agency relationships.  Marketing vs growth vs sales. Content strategies that work. Measurement and metrics. Strategy planning vs execution.  Tim...

Brain-hurt scale = 9/10. SEO is dead. Email is dead. Facebook is dead. It's all about inbound not outbound now. If I had a dollar for everyone saying something is dead, I'd be a rich man. Unfortunately, many will follow this advice based on the assumed credibility of the brand saying it. Most of the time, they are just positioning themselves as an alternative to the 'dead' thing, and pushing their...

Brain-hurt scale = 7/10. "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business." Peter Drucker.  Innovation always seems to make the list of one of the top priorities for...

Brain-hurt scale = 5/10. Great products sell themselves and advertising is just the price you pay for a bad product right? Word of Mouth Marketing or WOM. Is it even a channel? Can you really grow without spending money on advertising? Can you enhance the natural rate of WOM? The TL:DR answer is Yes. Yes and Yes.  Right now, budgets are getting crimped and the heat is on for high-cash bu...

Brain-hurt scale = 8/10. We've all heard of the data breach scandals. Cambridge Analytica. Hackers holding customer databases to ransom, demanding Bitcoin payments. Platforms sharing your data with other companies who you weren't even aware of. GDPR privacy crackdowns in Europe. Senate enquiries in the US. Customer lists being stolen by employees and used to start new businesses. Data was once des...

Brain-hurt scale = 6/10. "I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around th...

Brain-hurt scale = 8/10. Strategy has become such a buzzword these days. More often, just a prefix added to job titles to make it sound more attractive, not whether the job requires real strategy acumen or not. Everyone seems to be acting 'strategic'. But what does that even mean? Who better to unpack all these questions than someone who just finished working for one of the largest companies in th...

Brain-hurt scale = 5/10. Vayner Media, Zac Efron, Paris Hilton, Graeme Turner, Chris Voss - these are the sorts of people that Ronsley works with. And to say that he's learnt a few things or two would be an understatement. He's all about using content strategically - for maximum gain. And yes, we talk under the guise of podcasting a little, but also far broader. By listening all the way through, y...

Brain-hurt scale = 7/10. Just last week I had 3 different people ask me for advice on podcast promotion. And I came up short on giving them a detailed answer. So you know what this means? I needed to ego-check and delve a bit deeper. So if you've wondered about how to use podcasts in your promotional mix, or how to promote your own podcast so it becomes a valuable asset for your brand - this is an...

Brain-hurt scale = 4/10. Everything else being equal, the strength of your offer can make or break the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Boring CTA's like 'buy now' or 'find out more' or 'book a demo' can scuttle sales by a substantial percentage. So consider this situation. You're about to buy a boring, commoditized, financial product. Then an ad comes on TV with Jerry Seinfeld as the spok...

Brain-hurt scale = 8/10. Just days earlier, Ross Sergeant, global head of media and touchpoints at Asahi, spoke to a conference where he debunked the 40/60 rule advocated by Binet and Field. Most marketing scientists, and savvy marketers in the crowd were not surprised. But so alluring and well-crafted are some of these 'laws', many in the UK, Australia and beyond, are still convinced a reliable p...

Brain-hurt scale = 6/10. Parents only use Facebook, teens only use TikTok, Instagram is dying, Twitter is already dead, and YouTube is just for video.  Out of all the media that brands can use, perhaps Social is one of the most misunderstood, and it's a victim of it's own accessibility. The more everyone can use a medium, the more everyone thinks they know how to use it and how it works under...

Brain-hurt scale = 6/10. A long time ago, back in the good ol’ days of the Google internet, I learnt the power of affiliate marketing first hand. Affiliate strategies let you take advantage of an assumed message source separation. This is where the customer assumes the source of the message is not the advertiser.  Example, you pay the owner of a blog site within your niche, for the privilege...

"I am going to love doing this podcast. Because I don't expect to ever be hired into an investment bank or in-house M&A team ever again, I can be brutally honest." We talked further, but he had me at 'brutally honest'. That was the moment I knew we needed to interview Peter and uncover this murky world. An overlooked way to quickly grow a business is to simply acquire customers. Customers whic...

“It’s easy to make bad decisions with data” he said straight off the bat. In today’s tech infected world, it can seem vogue to tout the fact that you’re data-driven. Kind of like it’s a badge of honor that provides an air of superiority over the other ill-informed business heathens. But what is data? What isn’t data? Are the people who call themselves data-driven, actually data-driven underneath?...

Don't fear - this isn't an episode about accounting but rather how understanding some financial fundamentals can make you a far better marketer or growth professional. This is the point where marketing professional's career otherwise plateaus. If you've ever had trouble getting initiatives or projects approved, often it's not political. It's just that the business case is weak. So I thought that i...

In between the strategy and channel episodes, we feature some interviews with active practitioners. After the Robin Daniels (ex WeWork CMO) episode and two other entrepreneur interviews, it was time for another.  So today we’re talking with Matthew Hammon, Australian ex-pat who now lives in New York. He’s earned his stripes over the years, leaning on an early entrepreneurial journey which sta...