A note from the author:
Welcome to my 2025 thought leadership page. Here you’ll be able to read back through all of my thoughts, the latest being just below this note here closer to the top of the page. Enjoy!
It’s scary when the thing that’s been powering growth stops working. But that’s normal for online businesses using performance marketing.
In the early days you’re small enough that fast growth is available by reaching potential customers that are already shopping online and not loyal to a competitor.
But once you’re a bit bigger, continued growth means reaching outside the readily available pool of customers, converting people who are loyal to competitors, or bringing new people into the market.
If you do that, you not only get a direct effect on sales but a synergy that improves what your performance marketing can do.
We’ve seen this pattern so many times, it qualifies as a model. That’s why @Tom Roach and I made the ramp and bump chart here.
But it’s not easy to get the transition that’s needed right. You need different types of advertising that require different skills.
I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds of marketing people through it, and then packaged all that up into a super practical course, complete with frameworks, modern case studies, and simple things you can do with your own data.
🚩Learn how to be the expert on what works at every stage of the journey on my/our course Scaling Up Works to be the expert. So you grow and the business will too. Next intake is 29th April.
Read more via the header, or chat to Imogen at [email protected] if you have questions or want to book a group.
Anyone fancy a sugar free chocolate cake? No? Me neither.
Well, how about a beer with no alcohol in it, then? Hmm, well, maybe. It is January after all.
The evidence shows that you’re much more likely to be a “maybe” vs. a big fat “no” on this if advertising for 0% beer makes you feel happy about saying yes.
And that’s what this Heineken campaign did.
Instead of highlighting product features, it showed happy people enjoying a non-alcoholic beer in places where a full-booze beer would be very wrong – like the gym, or the boardroom while giving a presentation.
And it worked. In under a year airing these ads, Heineken 0.0 has seen their consideration increase 6%.
That’s a bigger percentage than the amount of alcohol in a regular Heineken, and it’s significantly faster than is normal for a slow-moving measure like this one.
And Heineken 0.0 is not an outlier. Looking at a big sample of campaigns, Binet & Field found 29% of those with emotional messages got large profit growth vs. just 12% when the ads were rational.
Emotional advertising isn’t just for big businesses like Heineken. No matter your size, campaigns that make people feel something drive more growth than rational product messaging.
The Tracksuit team’s study “The Emotion Effect” has plenty more data and examples, including tips for smaller businesses and entry level channels like YouTube. Click here to read more.
Drab December and the power of phy-gital retail.
December UK retail footfall was down a little (2.2%) compared to 2023. Shopping centres were most notably impacted in this ‘drab december’, suffering a 3.3% decline in footfall.(1)
However, physical retail isn’t going anywhere. The left-hand chart shows that 71% of people now shop in physical stores as often or more often than before the pandemic.
The right-hand chart shows the benefit of a good in-store experience. Customers who find strong digital content and get personalised service are more than 25% more likely to buy something.
For example, IKEA offer a personalised experience, allowing shoppers to visualise how furniture looks in their own home.
Cotswold Outdoors took the other route and went for digital content. They turned their physical shopping experience into a “phy-gital” one by offering 3D foot scans and running gait analysis, as well as outerwear and skiwear fittings.
To further combat declining footfall, they also launched a brand-building campaign featuring high quality video and display ads underscoring the brand values.
They placed ads at crucial decision-making moments, like on YouTube and paid social, and combined them with programmatic OOH near physical stores. And it worked! Cotswold Outdoors increased footfall by 5% to physical retail units and online traffic by 55% above forecasts.
Most businesses know that availability and distribution is important, but most don’t think about it as a marketing opportunity. Place is one of the 4Ps of marketing that have somehow got absorbed into other departments.
If you want to be the expert on how the 4Ps matter for your business AND for the effectiveness of your advertising try our course Data Works. Read more via the header or chat to Imogen via [email protected] for group bookings and questions.
The size of synergies is surprisingly substantial. So how do you manage them well?
It’s not surprising that synergies exist, of course. Everyone that’s worked in a media agency knows that using different channels together works well for advertising payback.
But did you know that these effects are really very big? And did you know that they’ve been increasing rapidly in the last 10 years?
The chart shows the evidence on what you get for increasing the number of channels from 1 to 5, using the same spend. Econometrics reports a huge 35-65% more ROI, and you more than double the effect on your brand metrics.
Also interesting is that as advertisers have incorporated more channels, the contribution of synergy effects has more than doubled. In 2014 synergies made up 18% of the effect of campaigns, now its 41%.
So, making the most of synergies is now more important than ever.
No single media channel can get everyone for 30 glorious seconds any more, but together, the modern media stack can deliver a critical mass of smaller exposures.
But you need to make sure it all gels together.
If a target customer looks at yoga content on Instagram, reads the FT, and clicks the odd like on a Grace Kite LinkedIn post, you need an algorithm that places ads in front of her in all of those places, and you need the ads she sees to work together in her mind.
If you want to be the expert in modern brand building, our course Scaling Up Works next intake is 29th April. Read more via the header or chat to Imogen via [email protected] for questions and group bookings.
The best an ad can get – probably includes great audio.
Gillette relaunched an updated version of a famous ad of theirs from the 80s right before Christmas last year. You’ve probably seen it.
You’ve almost certainly heard it! “Gillette! 🎶The best a man can geeeet!” 🎶
It’s been on telly all year, including being all over coverage of the men’s Euros last summer.
And the chart above shows how much the ad, perhaps more the song, has worked. Searches for Gillette’s famous brand line, and the song’s hook, “the best a man can get” have never been higher.
And it’s not just Gillette, in a study by IPSOS, ads using audio brand assets were found – on average – to be almost 3.5 times more likely to attract attention to the brand.
And sonic brand cues – specific music, sounds, or phrases you might consistently hear in a brand’s ads – are almost 9x more likely to attract attention!
It’s no wonder that McDonalds’s “ba-dada-da-daa” is so well known – even after they dropped the “I’m lovin it” part!
Ultimately, Gillette’s ear worm makes for a good ad – It might even be a good song… Gillette recently caved in and put the whole thing on Spotify!
You may not have an ambition to chart on Spotify’s end of year round up in 2025, but you probably do want your ads to “cut through” 😉.
If so, take a lesson from Gillette and put as much effort into how your ads sound as how they look.
Want to be an expert at adding Google trends data to your marketing evaluation toolkit? Our course Scaling Up Works starting 29th April 2025 uses google trends data in the homeworks, so you can practice applying it to your business. Read more and book via the header or drop Imogen a message via [email protected].
2025 is the year of more meh, when it comes to the economy.
I know, sorry. I wanted to be able to say that 2025 would be the economic bounce back. But that’s not the way it’s going to go.
It’s true that inflation has fallen and probably won’t come back. And that does mean central banks can cut interest rates & lenders can pass savings on to homeowners.
The trouble is that we’re still under the cosh on other expenses. Incomes haven’t risen enough to cover price rises that have already happened on things people just have to buy.
The average British person still feels much poorer than they did before COVID. Everything still feels expensive.
So, even though the c.60% of marketers who think 2025 will be better than 2024* are probably right, it’s only going to be a little bit better.
Across 7 different reputable forecasts for economic growth in 2025, the average was less than 1%, normal is 2-2.5%.
There’s no easy answer to whether it’s the year for big marketing bets. You need to take into account your sector, your target audience, and the impact your marketing can make.
Reading your data well will matter more than ever, so if you want to be the expert try our course Data Works. Go to the header to read more or chat to Imogen via [email protected] for group bookings or questions.
We’re voting with our feet!
The chart compares Christmases and reveals a rapid movement of money from big TV ads into lots of little ads that appear on little screens for little time, gathering only a little attention.
It wasn’t that long ago, remember? When all the big Christmas TV ads came out, people chose their favourite schmaltzy ad, Dawn French was a fairy, and Boots went with a black Mrs Claus.
But away from LinkedIn and Campaign, the whole thing was increasingly irrelevant. Even at the time of year where trust, familiarity and strong brands matter most, advertising money was abandoning the big telly ad.
A theme for 2025 is going to be building brand with a lot of little things. Here’s 3 tips from this emerging field for effectiveness research:
The evidence shows that “lots of littles” works. You get 35-65% more sales for the same budget if you use 5 media channels instead of one, and up to 100% more with integrated brand and performance vs. performance on its own.
🚩If you sell online and want to be the expert on brand building – learn how to do it, how to get it right, and how to know its working by doing our course Scaling Up Works. Next intake is 29th April, go to the header to read more and book. If you want to build a shared language with a group, or have a question chat to Imogen via [email protected].
Want to be the expert in marketing, knowing what works AND how to get your business to sign off on it? Get your training requests in now for our courses Spring cohorts.
We have two @magic works courses starting in April, they’re full of practical stuff, not just the theory you get everywhere else. And they’re all done in the plain speaking, down-to-earth @magic numbers way.
Both courses are full of frameworks, tips, modern case studies and things you can easily do with your own data. They’ll send you back to your desk empowered and ready to take on the world, so you can be the expert, get your voice heard and grow.
Check them out in the navigation pane at the top of the page! Our next intake is this Spring.
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