Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Why creatives should wear bowties
Last week Rory Sutherland explained on his blog “Why creatives should wear ties occasionally”. He talked about the relevance of old tried and tested techniques in modern advertising and used the iPhone single page ad as an example of a “perfectly sensible kind of advertising” that is so rare these days. He described how the ad “contains a large shot of the product so you know what it looks like, carries a headline which discloses a consumer benefit and, ‘…’ contains a series of little captions (old direct marketing hands will know them as “call-outs”) wherein a number of words are arranged in some grammatical order to convey to the reader useful information about what the product does.”
Many of these techniques were invented a long time ago by early direct response pioneers like John Caples and Claude Hopkins, whose book Scientific Advertising I mentioned in my previous post on marketing accountability in 1923. Over the past few years we have seen a new generation of direct response practitioners emerge. They combine Hopkins’ and Caples’ relentless focus on results with a thorough understanding of modern web analytics and testing tools.
Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are great examples of this new breed of marketing practitioners. They have written extensively on digital consumer persuasion techniques and their blog grokdotcom is full of practical tips on how to improve online conversions through making small changes to your site.
Bryan Eisenberg recently teamed up with Google to write Always Be Testing, a book on how to get the maximum out of Google Site Optimizer – a free testing software package by Google. GSO allows the user to test multiple versions of their website automatically and thereby makes testing extremely easy, fast and cheap. Always Be Testing is packed with tips and suggestions that will get you addicted to testing. It will change the way you work.
[...] My earlier post talked briefly about the power of testing and the emergence of a different breed of creatives who embrace the feedback of results they can get from the web and make it part of the way they work. But can the role of data in the creative process be taken too far? [...]