Awesome Doesn’t Have a Medium

It's not about having the best (creative) idea.

Twelpforce: Participatory, saves money, and provides a creative solution. It's crowdsourcing done right.

It's getting the best idea to market (and effectively framing your message). In other words; the best business idea.
Great marketers tell stories. Constraints help shape them. Great stories break constraints.
Ouch. Makes your head hurt doesn't it? This is the current situation that marketers are dealing with. Now compound this with attention scarcity, a broadcast mentality and an afterthought on digital? You have one heck of a mess.

Stop trying to figure it out.

This short film from Johnnie Walker by all intents and purposes of traditional marketing shouldn't work. Yet it does (and it's beautiful to boot).

You should have only two qualifications for creating a marketing program: a) Is it useful? and b) Is it awesome?
If the answer to both those questions is yes? Congratulations, enjoy Cannes. (No seriously.)
Those two traits are at the heart of every great campaign, program and brand for the last one hundred years (and will be for the next one hundred years).

Defining Utility

This may save your life.

Utility needs to provide a direct tangible benefit to the consumer of your content. However, the key is providing valuable, useful marketing that doesn't want to make your consumer take a drill to their head to break up the boredom. Utility isn't so much about the medium as the end result.

Lower barriers to entry, providing brisk service and a solution that works all take precedence (not complete control mind you) over content style/creation. Sometimes, the most effective utility is as simple as an informative print ad. Utility is a true example of the ends needing to justify the business means.

Utility is essential. It won't truly take off though unless it's awesome.

Defining Awesome

If I have to describe why this is awesome to you? Get the hell off this blog. No, seriously.

What is "awesome"? It's a harder question than you might think. After all, we all have different interpretations of what it's made up of. Faris Yakob puts it better than anyone I've ever heard before in this summation:

"And technology isn't just about utility.
It can be about emotion - especially awe.
As I allude to above, the NYTimes has done a study of the most shared articles on their website and they all trigger awe - which makes sense because
AWE IS SOMETHING YOU WANT TO SHARE
Which is why it incumbent upon us to always be looking for the awesome."

Thus in order to want to share something; your content needs to be awesome. "Want" shouldn't be anywhere the equation; you need to share this content. Consumers don't share marketing with their friends because they care about brands, they share that information because they care about their friends.

All Shapes, All Sizes

Don't be constrained by medium though. In order to be effective you need to be able to think beyond mediums, length, constraints and anything else.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has a run time of 558 minutes (683 minutes in the extended version). It also has the honor of being the most lucrative film trilogy of all time.

By your powers combined...

All marketing (that works) can be boiled down into awesomeness and utility. The key is figuring out to to combine the two in the most effective manner and how it directly relates to/satisfies your business objectives. How do you think marketing will evolve moving forward? Will it still adhere to these two tenets?

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