Catalyst Marketing

3 ways marketing can help sales close more deals (and faster)

It’s no secret that companies with good sales enablement close 15% more deals than companies without.

Not to mention that nurtured leads spend more money (by almost 50%).

Which is why if you’re not already paying attention to sales enablement, it’s time to start.

Of course, once you recognize that, the question becomes: where exactly do we start?

We’ve got three answers for you:

1. Involve sales in your strategy.

Identifying your target audiences? Doing brand research? Figuring out customers’ core problems and how you can communicate your company’s solution?

Involve your sales team.

They’ve got knowledge that can help you figure out the right questions to ask, surprise you with common customer problems or objections you didn’t know about, and help you segment customers into smaller groups you can personalize your marketing for.

Not to mention that sales has questions of their own and if you’re doing something like market research, you can probably kill two birds with one stone—getting the marketing and sales info you need.

2. Use sales knowledge to develop your funnel.

What does your customer journey look like? If you’re like most companies (68%, according to this research), you don’t know.

And that’s a problem. Because if you don’t know what the journey looks like, how will you usher your customers along the path toward a purchase?

This means it’s time to get to know your funnel. How do customers make buying decisions? How do they get to you? What pushes them over the edge into the sale?

And because your funnel extends from first impression to closing the sale (and hopefully beyond to upsells and customer loyalty), it’s not just marketing that should be weighing in as you figure it out. Sales needs a seat at the table—from the beginning.

3. Create content sales teams actually want to use.

Here’s an awkward truth: 60 – 70% of B2B content created by marketing is never used.

That’s right, all that work you put into that whitepaper? It’s been flushed down the toilet.

The reasons for this are myriad—lack of trust between marketing and sales, mismatch in what sales needs and what marketing develops, a lack of clear strategy about where in the funnel that content belongs.

This means there are quite a few things marketing needs to address when it comes to content creation.

The first is the simplest: ask the sales team what they need. Is there a common challenge prospects want addressed? Is there an opportunity to educate customers on a certain topic? What are prospects excited about when sales first reaches out? What scares them? What frustrates the hell out of them—and how can we show them that our products or services alleviate that frustration like their own private fairy godmother?

The more you involve sales in strategizing content, the more likely they are to use it. Both because it’ll be useful to their funnel and because involving them early builds trust, communicates respect for what they’re doing, and bridges that age-old gap between marketing and sales.

Need more guidance?

Bridging the gap between marketing and sales is kind of our thing. If you’d like an agency to help you figure it out, we’d love to talk.

Everything you do is branding

Mary Higgins Clark was known as the queen of suspense. Apple makes sleek, smart tech for cool people. Disney is magical and family-friendly. And Gordon Ramsay is that screamy chef who won’t settle for anything less than perfection.

If you’re nodding along with any of those descriptions, I’m not surprised. Because the above people and companies have done a damn fine job of branding—of letting us all know how we should feel about them, who they are, and what they stand for.

We think of Mary Higgins Clark and we automatically think “suspense.”

We imagine Disney and think of flying carpets and theme park rides (not to mention, catchy songs we just can’t get out of our heads).

We picture Gordon Ramsay and we’d never call him a nice guy, but we all know he’s not going to put up with his restaurants doing anything but quality work.

Now, not every brand above may be your cup of tea. But chances are, you know what they are. You know what they stand for. And that’s a big win for those companies, because when we need what they offer, we know exactly where to find them.

This, friends, is the power of branding—understanding who you are and communicating that intangible personality to your prospects and customers.

So how do companies like Disney, and famous folks like our queen of suspense, pull it off? The answer starts with three simple things:

1. They know who they are.

Brand is to business as personality is to an individual. It’s the combination of factors that make you, you. And if you don’t know who you are, how do you expect anyone else to describe your brand?

This is why you need a brand strategy—and I don’t mean just a logo and some colors, and a catchy tagline. I mean you need to understand what your brand’s personality is. Are you funny and sweary and irreverent like yours truly? Are you intense and powerful and outdoorsy like Red Bull? Are you sleek and smart like Apple? Or a helpful problem-solver like Salesforce?

Once you nail that down, everything else should stem from it. Your brand colors should reflect your personality. Your logo should. And, of course, your content—be it written, spoken, animated, or illustrated—absolutely should. (In fact, 46% of brand image comes from what you say and how you say it.)

2. They incorporate their brand across everything they do.

Consistent branding across all channels increases revenue by 23%. Which means once you understand your brand, it’s time to make sure every channel you’ve got matches up.

Now, the first things people think of when we say this are websites, brochures, signs, and social media. But that’s not all we mean. Branding should permeate everything. Customer service phone calls. Employee meetings. Customer stories. Talks you give at conferences. Guest articles you publish off your site.

Just like it’d be weird for Beyonce to suddenly start speaking in tech jargon or Marilyn Manson to get onstage and start reading children’s books aloud, departing from your brand will feel jarring or weird to customers and prospects—and may well drive them away. Which means once you have a brand, it’s time to commit—across every platform, channel, and communication type.

3. They’ve stopped trying to appeal to everybody.

There’s no such thing as a product or brand that’s “for everybody”. Which is why it’s funny that almost everybody comes into branding sessions answering the question “who is your audience?” with some version of “everyone!”

To have a solid brand, we have to get past this. Because even the most successful companies in the world aren’t trying to appeal to every single person on the planet.

If you’re looking for a deep literary novel, Mary Higgins Clark isn’t the right author for you. If historical women behaving badly are your jam (let’s be honest: they’re mine), you’re probably more interested in Rejected Princesses than Disney.

One of the challenges any new brand faces is letting go of the idea that a strong brand will alienate people. If you do branding right, the only people you’re sending away are the people who aren’t right for you anyway. If you’re selling suspense novels, what do you care if the romance crowd isn’t interested? If you’re a divorce lawyer, why would it matter that single people pass your brochure right on by?

At the end of the day, success isn’t about volume anyway. Success is about finding the right people who need your product or service. What good branding does is home in on those right people.

Okay, so what’s next?

Nodding along with all this but not sure how to start defining your own brand? That’s where we come in. Reach out anytime. We’d love to talk about how we can help.

Personalization is a bitch. But does it have to be?

For more than a few years now, personalization has been touted as marketing’s next holy grail.

And with good reason.

86% of people say personalization impacts their buying choices. 49% of customers have made impulse purchases based on personalized recommendations from brands. And retail powerhouse Amazon says a whopping 35% of its sales come from personalized recommendations.

So personalization is a serious contender for “most valuable marketing investment.”

Of course, anything worth doing can also be a real bitch to get done. Which is why it may not surprise you to learn that the latest data from Gartner says 80% of us marketers are probably going to give up on personalization in the next five years.

So why exactly is personalization so hard that Gartner thinks it’s going to go the way of the dodo?

A big part of the reason is the utterly overwhelming tidal wave of data we’re all struggling to swim through. One survey found that the average company manages a whopping 163 terabytes of data and the average enterprise is approaching 348 terabytes. For reference, you could fit 500 hours of movies on a single terabyte.

No wonder 87% of marketers say data is their company’s most underutilized asset.

The good news is that being crushed under a terabyte of data doesn’t have to be our marketing future. These challenges aren’t inevitable.

The solution here is two-fold:

First, marketers need to collect less data (while prioritizing data that actually matters). If I’m selling products entirely online, do I really need your address? Does my shoe business need to know if you’re married or not? Does my online bookstore really need your gender? (Hint: probably not.)

Honestly, we’re not convinced that companies need much demographic data at all. Because studies show that past customer behavior is 20x more likely to predict future customer behavior.

Second, we need technology to wrangle all those terabytes. We need tech that brings all that data—which currently lives in a variety of disconnected systems like a CRM, an email marketing system, and that series of sticky notes Herb insists on keeping on his cubicle wall—into one centralized place. Tech that lets us sort that giant pile of data with a few clicks. Even better, tech with built-in machine learning and artificial intelligence that takes out the guesswork of personalization and lets us automate it.

Because, let’s be honest, none of us can personalize for hundreds of thousands of customers by hand. We can’t even get through the damn pile of data.

As one expert said over at Marketing Land, “the best marketers I have seen are embracing…machine learning and automation, firstly, to understand what their consumers are looking for in real-time [and to respond] with tailored, personalized content and messages that resonate.”

Here’s the bottom line: it may be true that companies are going to start throwing in the personalization towel. But that doesn’t negate very real numbers like Amazon’s 35% of sales that come from personalization efforts.

And the choice is coming: give up and let the competitors pass you by or be part of the 20% that refuses to give up, embraces new technology, and reaps the benefits of personalization.

If you’re the latter, we’d love to help you figure out the best strategy for your ongoing personalization efforts. Contact us anytime.

7 top tips to make a great presentation

Marketing presentations. Sales presentations. Client-facing decks. Internal. External. Live. Recorded. Webinar. On stage.

There are as many types of presentations as there are audiences for them. And no matter how we feel about them, the truth is that for most of us, they’re unavoidable. In fact, according to the BBC, as many as 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created each day.

Which is why no matter how you feel about presentations, they’re probably here to stay. And if you’re going to give one, you better make sure it’s great.

Here are seven tips for ensuring just that:

1. Tell a story.

Did you know that people are 22 times more likely to remember a fact if it’s introduced with a story? Which is probably why 80% of customers say they want brands to tell stories.

This applies to our websites. Our social accounts. Our print materials. Our video.

And, of course, our presentations.

Because presentations aren’t different than other types of marketing. They’re another opportunity to tell a story, capture a prospect, engage a customer. And 90% of people believe a strong narrative is critical for presentation engagement.

2. Embrace the rule of 3.

A long-time copywriting trick, the rule of 3 suggests that a list of 3 things—3 jokes, 3 things to do, 3 characters, 3 stories—is more powerful than a list of 2 or 4 or 17. Turn it up to 4 and things get harder to remember. Drop it down to 2 and it feels somehow…less satisfying.

Now, it’s not always possible to boil everything down to three. But when you can, it’s a powerful tool for engagement and memory.

3. Use strong visuals.

Presentations with good visuals are 43% more effective than those without. And it’s no wonder, since our brains process images 60,000 times quicker than text.

4. Ruthlessly cut down your word count.

The best practice here is to focus on one idea per slide, make sure your audience instantly “gets it”, and keep things short and sweet. One recent study found that short presentations performed far better than their long counterparts. On average, the worst performers were 12 pages longer than the best.

5. Use stats.

Data can shock, delight, and make us sit up and pay attention. It can also boost your credibility and turn skeptics into supporters. Don’t overdo it, but do use studies, stats, and data-driven visuals to back up your points.

6. Make your presentations two-way.

64% of people believe two-way interaction makes a presentation more engaging. 68% say interactive presentations are more memorable. And 65% believe they’re more persuasive. Which is probably why experts say by the end of the year, 2 million events will be using live polling and Q&A.

7. Ask for help when you need it.

Making your presentation the best it can be is rarely a solo effort. Don’t be afraid to ask your designers to spiff up your deck, ask your data pros to weigh in on stats, and ask your content person to give it a strategic once-over.

And if you need some extra eyes, hands, and minds on the project? We can help.

Top Tip for Website Redesign – Don’t Skip UX

Building a website or application? Skipping this step could cost you big.

Most marketers are leaving a lot of money on the table.

And we mean a lot.

Like 50%-of-your-profits, millions-of-dollars, the-difference-between-success-and-failure, now-you-have-to-sell-your-startup-at-half-its-value kind of a lot.

How, you ask? How are companies leaving so damn much on the table?

The answer: By skipping UX (user experience) strategy.

A whopping 88% of online customers are unlikely to return to your site after a bad experience. And 46% of online shoppers say they’ve left a company website because they can’t even figure out what the hell that company does.

The truth is that frictionless UX can raise customer conversion rates by as much as 400%, according to recent research by Forrester.

And if those stats aren’t enough, just look at the stories.

Icons8 launched a website redesign that they thought was pretty and minimalistic in the right way. But their lack of UX strategy meant that same website absolutely tanked their user experience, resulting in a whopping 50% drop in icon requests.

Then there’s Digg. Remember them? (Only vaguely, right? Here’s why.) A series of user-unfriendly redesigns with no UX strategy took them from a $160 million valuation to a $500,000 sale price. That’s less than 1% of their former valuation.

And if that one doesn’t sting enough, Marks & Spencer stepped up to the UX-fuck-up plate and spent 150 million pounds (nearly $200 million) on a new website, only to lose 200 million pounds (about $260 million) as a result.

Of course, those are just retail companies and social media. We’re not even talking about truly high stakes industries—like aviation, healthcare, and government. In those industries, bad UX has quite literally led to extreme medication overdoses, plane crashes, premature hospital release for extremely sick patients, and even death.

Which brings us to our question:

Why the hell are so many companies skipping UX strategy?

In our experience, it’s one of the first things to go when companies start trying to lower their budget. Perhaps because they can’t see a way around skipping design or the coding side of things. And so something less tangible-seeming—like UX strategy and content strategy—gets the short straw.

The problem here is that it’s so short-sighted. You might have a tight budget today, but saving a few thousand now and losing out on a 400% bump in conversion rates is just foolishness. Darwin-Awards-level foolishness. Peloton tone-deaf-ad-level foolishness. Like that guy you knew in college who thought he could ride his skateboard up a wall and ended up in the hospital kind of foolishness.

You already know the moral of this story.

Don’t skip UX.

Seriously. You’ll regret it.

And if you need some help figuring out how to get it right? That’s what we’re here for.

Are trade shows dead yet?

Salesforce’s Dreamforce. Oracle’s Open World. Hubspot’s INBOUND. SXSW.

For years, trade shows have been growing at a fast clip. So fast, in fact, that the $15.7 billion industry is projected to hit $18.5 billion by 2023.

And, hey, it makes sense. Trade shows are big networking opportunities. They help us keep up with industry trends. Sometimes they lead to referral business. And who doesn’t like grabbing drinks with colleagues who you don’t get to see that often?

But here’s the big question:

With the prices skyrocketing year-over-year, when do trade shows stop being worth it?

Tickets to Dreamforce run as much as $2,299—and Open World and INBOUND aren’t far behind. And that’s just the tickets. Add in the cost of meals, taxis, plane tickets, and vastly inflated accommodations, and tradeshows start to add up fast.

In fact, during SXSW, Austin rental prices triple—going from an average of $200 per night to $600 per night. And other trade shows create similar pricing jumps.

It’s great news for hotels. Not so great news for event attendees.

A friend recently attended Dreamforce in downtown San Francisco and spent a whopping $1,600 per night at a two-star hotel downtown. Now, that’s just straight-up criminal. At rates like that, a week-long trade show would run you upwards of $13,000.

Which begs the question, are you getting enough ROI on that $13,000 spend? Really?

Unless you’re walking out with a PhD, we think the answer might be no. Especially since other marketing tactics don’t require nearly as much investment to generate big returns.

Like content marketing, a tactic whose leaders experience 800% more growth than their competitors.

Or video, which has the best ROI of any marketing tactic, according to more than half of marketers surveyed.

Or email marketing, which generates $38 for every $1 you spend.

Or, most important of all, strategy, the only marketing investment that keeps building on itself long into the future.

Marketing budgets are finite (obviously). Which is why when you get beyond the hype and excitement of real-time events, the ever-rising costs just don’t feel worth it anymore. We could do much more with that $13,000 investment into strategy or content. So why would we spend it on a depressing two-star hotel room that costs $1,600 per night?

So you won’t find the Catalyst team spending that kind of cash on trade shows anytime soon. And it’s probably a good time for you to reassess your event spending. Is it really getting you the returns you need?

And if you’re looking for help figuring out how to get the most ROI for your buck? We’d love to help. Contact our team to talk about your marketing goals anytime.

B2B tech marketing is still boring. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?

B2B tech marketing is still boring. Here’s how to stop putting your prospects to sleep.

Close your eyes and think of the best ads you’ve seen this year.

Go ahead. We’ll wait.

Now, how many of them are for B2B tech companies? Because if you’re like most people, we’re guessing the answer is a big, fat zero.

And if the answer is zero, you’re in good company. Google pretty much any variation on “best marketing of the year” and you’ll get lists of 10, 20, 30 top marketing campaigns—and not a single one will be from a B2B tech brand (we know; we’ve searched).

And isn’t that ironic? That companies known for being on the cutting edge of technology are the same companies with the most cookie-cutter, boring, predictable marketing campaigns out there?

Give the average person a B2C brochure and a B2B tech brochure and I guarantee you they’d rather read the former. Not because the average person isn’t buying B2B tech, but because B2B marketing materials are about as boring and predictable as a Tom Cruise movie—and about as uncomfortable to read as 50 Shades of Grey.

Every other word is jargon. Every marketing claim is the same claim you’ll find down the street at Similar Tech Company X. Brochures read like dissertations. And customers could be forgiven for assuming that the robots your brand has been building have taken over the marketing department and are trying to masquerade as humans.

(And if you’re about to tell us that you need your jargon to speak to industry insiders, we’ve got news for you: Survey says 88% of people pretend to understand jargon at work. So all those people you think you’re communicating with? You’re probably not.)

So, what’s a B2B marketer to do?

The answer starts with ditching the status quo. No more Tom Cruise movies…err, same-ol’ marketing brochures. No more talking like the AI is in charge. No more cookie-cutter marketing strategies.

And—importantly—stop acting like B2B buyers are emotionless robots.

Because studies show that emotional connection drives 306% more lifetime value than customer satisfaction alone. Emotionally invested customers stick with brands longer. And—surprise!—that emotional connection is even more important if you’re B2B, according to a study by a little company you might have heard of, called Google.

And if emotionally-charged, jargon-free tech marketing sounds scary?

Too bad.

In marketing, it’s change or die. Get ahead or go home. Innovate or go the way of Blockbuster—knocked out by Netflix because they weren’t willing to change.

As long as your competitors aren’t taking risks, you can all float along together okay. But as soon as someone starts amping up the emotional connection, talking like a human, and innovating like a marketer, the competition is going to get stiff.

Wouldn’t you rather be the one leading the charge? The Netflix of your industry, instead of the Blockbuster?

If so, let’s talk. B2B tech marketing that isn’t boring is kind of our wheelhouse.

Want your marketing to be more relevant? React faster—and better.

Want your marketing to be more relevant? React faster—and better.

Congratulations to Peloton! They’ve won this holiday season’s award for biggest marketing blunder!

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you probably already know the story. For Christmas, the company launched an ad featuring a slim woman whose husband gifted her a Peloton exercise bike and subscription to their virtual spin classes. In the video, she documents her fitness journey and wraps up after a year by watching the videos of that journey with her husband and thanking him for the so-called gift that keeps on giving.

At best, the ad is boring and predictable. At worst, sexist and body-shaming.

Some argued that the expressions on the actress’ face made it look like she was trapped in an abusive marriage, making the ad take on a sinister tone. Others pointed out that there was simply no transformation. The actress says Peloton has changed her, but watchers don’t see any change. She starts thin, she stays thin. She starts nervous, she stays nervous. Still, others pointed to the ad’s blatant male gaze. The woman may be the focus of the ad, but the person getting the payoff from all her hard work isn’t her—it’s her husband, who gets to be thanked over and over again for this “transformational” gift.

After the ad, to the surprise of approximately no one except Peloton themselves, the brand watched as its shares tanked 9% in a single day and another 6% the day after, losing them $1.5 billion in value.

I could go on about what makes the ad so cringeworthy—from the weird relationship dynamic to the why-isn’t-this-dead-yet storytelling lens of the male gaze, to the absence of any real transformation in the story itself—but that’s been done and done well elsewhere.

What I want to talk about is the aftermath of this disaster of an ad.

Because within two weeks, something brilliant happened.

Another ad—this time for Aviation Gin—hit the airwaves. In it, the star of the Peloton ad (Monica Ruiz) stares at the camera in a daze. She’s out with two girlfriends, sans wedding ring, and they’re clearly concerned. One tells her she’s safe here. The other tells her she looks great. And after they toast “to new beginnings,” the actress downs her drink in a single gulp.

Looks like Peloton lady gathered up her courage and left her douchey husband for good.

As you might have guessed, the gin ad went viral, racking up over five million views in the last 10 days. Not to mention, an avalanche of press coverage.

And so, a little-known gin brand has become a household name.

All because Ryan Reynolds (yes, the actor, and also the man behind Aviation Gin) saw an opportunity and reacted quicker than most marketers would think possible. He saw the ad. He saw the backlash. And he saw an opportunity to make a humorous statement that made people feel heard.

Within 36 hours of getting the idea, he’d booked the actress, shot the commercial, and launched it into the internet with a tongue-in-cheek tweet: “Exercise bike not included.”

The runaway success of that second ad is a good reminder that, for marketers, sometimes quick reactions can pay off big.

We’ve written a lot about the importance of strategy. But good marketing isn’t just forward-thinking. It’s also nimble. It rolls with the punches. It sees an opportunity and drops everything to take it. It responds to people’s real feelings.

This is not only a huge win for Ryan and Aviation Gin, it’s also a missed opportunity for Peloton itself. In the face of all that backlash, the brand issued a passive-aggressive non-apology and went about its business. What if, instead, they’d made their own reaction video? What if they apologized for real? What if they showed those disappointed viewers that they got it, they heard them?

What if they said, hey, we’re sorry. We get it. Here’s the video we should have made in the first place. And then they gave us a video of a woman buying her own damn exercise bike, documenting her training, and then cycling to the top of a gorgeous mountain with her best girlfriends—the goal she’d been working toward all along.

Peloton’s failure wasn’t just in the original ad. It was also a failure to react—both quickly and well. When they didn’t, Ryan Reynolds and Aviation Gin did. And it’s pretty clear who’s reaping the benefits of that ad’s reach.

In other words, if you don’t pay attention, someone else will.

And if you need a team that gets it? Balancing long-term strategy with nimble execution on today’s opportunities is our jam. Let’s talk.

Is your marketing future-ready? (Survey says probably not.)

Ask any marketer how important strategy is to success and chances are they’ll tell you “very.” But according to a recent survey by CMO, for most marketers, that’s just lip service.

The truth is that most of us are spending our time putting out fires in the present—not planning for the future.

In fact, when CMO asked marketing leaders how much time they spend dealing with the here and now vs. planning for the future, the here and now won out big. Turns out, the average marketing leader spends 68.5% of their time living in the present and just 31.5% preparing for the future.

And while that’s great if you’re Queen Latifa in Last Holiday, cashing in your retirement on trips to snowy Czech villages and dates with LL Cool J because you’ve only got weeks to live, for marketers, too much living in the moment could trip up your future business plans.

Because here’s the cold, hard truth: Marketers who have a documented strategy are 538% more likely to succeed.

Yep. You read that right. 538%.

Not to mention that a study of 500 marketing case studies found that tactical marketing resulted in predictable sales spikes and declines, while strategic activities like branding resulted in a steady upward trajectory for sales.

It’s the difference between running in place and making slow, steady progress up a mountain.

And yet…despite the fact that strategy sets you up for real growth, 40% of businesses don’t have a marketing strategy and 45% don’t have a digital marketing strategy. Not to mention the stat above about how two thirds of marketing leaders’ time is dedicated to keeping tactics going in the present.

Which means that most of us are still dealing with the trees instead of looking at the forest. And 40% couldn’t find the forest with a map.

Now that’s pretty bleak. But here’s the good news: You’re probably not as far behind as you think. Just documenting your strategy increases your chances of success by over 500%. Just having a strategy puts you ahead of 40% of businesses.

So if you don’t have one? Getting ahead means making that your biggest priority of 2020.

And don’t forget that strategy isn’t a one-time thing. The future is something marketing leaders should always be looking toward. It not only increases your chances of success in terms of sales and ROI goals. It’s also pretty clearly the key to ditching an overreliance on referral business, reducing marketing leaders’ elevated stress levels, and avoiding the #1 biggest mistake B2B businesses make.

And if you’re thinking, yes, that’s exactly what I need in 2020, but you’re not sure where to start? That’s where we come in. Strategy is our wheelhouse, and we’d love to chat about helping with yours.

Strategy vs. creative—guess which one wins?

In 2009, Skittles turned their homepage into a feed of tweets mentioning the brand. They hoped to capture some real-time brand love, but the campaign quickly turned into a flood of sex jokes and Nazi propaganda across Skittles’ homepage.

In 2014, Subway launched an ad that told women if they’d just eat better, they’d look sexier in their Halloween costumes, damn it. Forget swimsuit season, you’d better be ready for the season of sexy corn on the cob and sexy poop emoji!

Somewhat less horrifying (unless you’re the marketing team that poured your life into it), in 2019, Planters shelled out at least $5 million on a Super Bowl ad that left watchers saying “meh.”

Here at Catalyst, we recently sat down and asked ourselves a question:

Do we want to be known as a creative agency or a strategic one?

At first glance, the difference may not seem so big. The obvious answer is that both creativity and strategy matter. Both are what we strive for. Both are priorities.

But the question was more subtle than that. Not should we give up one for the other? But rather, what’s the most important thing we do for our clients?

The answer was clear—and we’re guessing you’ve already guessed what it is.

Because you can have the best creative on the planet and still fail. You can have ideas on top of ideas on top of ideas and still alienate your customers. You can spend millions on perfect video production and celebrity cameos and still fail to move the needle on your business goals.

Just like Skittles, Subway, and Planters.

If you look at what those failures have in common, ultimately, it’s a failure of strategy, not creative.

Skittles’ homepage looked just fine. It worked just fine. The failure was strategic. Nobody asked the question “how will this help and serve our customers?” Nobody asked the question “what are all the different ways this could play out?” And, let’s be honest, nobody researched the platform they planned to use. Because anybody who’s spent more than a few hours on Twitter knows how quickly anything viral can go south.

(Just look at Microsoft’s Twitter AI failure. To be fair to Skittles, Microsoft flubbed up even worse than they did just a few years later.)

Same story with Subway’s sexist oopsie-daisy. The creative was, honestly, pretty damn good. The video quality. The production. The acting. It wasn’t creative that tanked the ad.

Again, it was strategy that went missing, just when the sandwich brand needed it most. They may have asked themselves “who’s our target customer?” But they definitely didn’t ask “and what do they want?” Or “what matters to them?”

Instead, they relied on stereotypes and past cultural norms that women were already damn tired of and had been protesting for years.

And Planters? Their problem was less politically charged, but that doesn’t make it any less of a kiss of death for the marketing team. Because a $5 million ad that leaves watchers shrugging in indifference? That’s a pretty epic failure.

And here we see an even clearer line between creative and strategy. Because again, creative wasn’t the problem here. The visuals were cool. The background music spot-on. They tossed in a Charlie Sheen joke with a Charlie Sheen cameo.

Yet, there was no payoff. No compelling story. Nothing to make customers think or laugh or remember the ad after a parade of much better Super Bowl spots. The failure, in other words, was again a failure of story and strategy. It was a failure to understand audience and move people toward a business goal. It was a failure of substance behind the creative.

Which is why when we weigh the value of creative and strategy, strategy wins every time.

Do we value good creative? Do we love the feeling of getting an illustration, a video, a website design just right? Damn straight, we do.

But at the end of the day, the thing that moves the needle for businesses is strategy. And so that is where we’ll hang our hats. That’s what’ll keep us up at night. That’s where we’ll ask the hard questions, fight for our clients, and make you and your team look damn good.

If you need an agency that sees the big picture? You’ve found us. Let’s talk.