Advertising – Funnel Reboot

Episode 207

Those of you who know me outside of this podcast, know that if I’m doing anything that involves advertising, whether it be in a classroom or a consulting setting, I think of ads as a complicated puzzle that is never fully solved. While it may not have a predictable outcome, there are a few key principles about it that are always true.

I’ve picked up these lessons one at a time, either by studying competitors or through the brands that entrusted me to run their ads—sometimes through painful trial and error. The models and principles that emerge from this process become a valuable piece of baseline knowledge, allowing you to make case-by-case decisions.

However, it’s hard to pass these insights along to others. They’re often too abstract, and the examples become stale and dated as campaigns retire.

Does this mean anyone wanting to adopt this perspective on advertising must go through the same process I did? Not necessarily. Thanks to someone with a gift for brevity and illustration, these principles have been distilled into a book.

As I leaf through its pages, I’m delighted to see many concepts I’ve known given clear shape and an easy-to-remember form.

Our guest graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life.

He’s one of the nicest authors I’ve had on, and he’s back on this show for a third time. Let’s go to England to speak with Dan White.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00 Intro
00:02:27 Welcome Dan
00:04:40 Oldest known advertisement
00:09:18 Uber’s clever transit ad
00:11:15 Positive and negative impacts of ads
00:22:47 using advertising to build brand asset
00:23:49 PSA
00:30:46 Many ways ads can tell a story
00:33:19 How brain perceives messages
00:37:43 Learning about ads through metaphor
00:45:45 Getting the book or contacting Dan

People, products or concepts mentioned in the show:

Dan on LinkedIn

Dan White’s Smart Advertising Book

Dan was previously on In Episode 166 and Episode 109

Hankin’s Hexagon

FMCG – Fast Moving Consumer Goods (packaged foods, beverages, snacks)

Listen to episode

Dan’s latest book demystifies advertising

Episode 196

There’s something we take for granted these days, something that wasn’t even possible a short while ago. Let’s go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That’s because at the time, the cellular networks could transmit at around a third of a Megabyte per second, which went up to 2Mb/second when 3G was fully available. Then LTE/4G started becoming available in North America, reaching 97 percent by 2013. With those data speeds, you could watch brief standard definition videos, and social networks like Instagram & Snapchat began letting you record and send short clips. By the late twenty teens, advanced 4G infrastructure was fast enough, from 12 to 80 MPS, for people to watch 4K videos on their devices, bringing platforms like TikTok along with it. Now with 5G out, lag-free high-def video is available almost everywhere. And if you are a marketer trying to reach consumers, it means that video must be part of the mix.

There are still quirks to these platforms that we need to figure out. Some of their ad units include ecommerce options for selling products while the ad’s in front of them. More broad that this, it’s hard to know how these platforms will react to videos you post. They know so much about a user’s privacy, it’s raised issues of which country that data’s shared with. Clearly, this calls for an expert’s help.

Our guest graduated from San Francisco State University and FIDM with a business degree and started working in-house at consumer eCommerce brands, running their digital marketing programs. After helping brands in every category from skincare & cosmetics to Books to jewelry, she built her own agency team to do this, Pennock, which is named after the rural Minnesota town where her family are from.

Let’s go to Northern California where she lives with her husband Tyler and three kids, to talk to Nikki Lindgren.

Chapter Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Intro

00:03:12 – Welcome Nikki

00:09:05 – Video on platforms like TikTok

00:23:37 – PSA

00:24:26 – Reporting to stakeholders

00:29:59 – Ad campaign optimization

00:35:05 – Contacting Nikki

Listen to episode

Category: Advertising

The Smart Advertising Book, with Dan White

Episode 207

Timestamps/Chapters:

Mastering Video Ads on Social, with Nikki Lindgren