There are few bets in business that offer the possibility of a hundredfold payoff. 1440’s Robin Grainger argues that the written word could be one of them.
Our industry mostly calls these words “content.” It’s a lousy term, though, applying equally to banal garbage spat out by Generative AIs, and to carefully crafted campaigns which shape opinions, close deals, and are long remembered.
It’s all too easy to believe you can achieve the latter by using the former. After all, they’re only words on a page. But that’s a dangerous assumption.
In many industries, one’s “content” is likely to be all a prospective buyer sees before deciding to buy or shortlist.
And in the most competitive, fastest-moving markets, differentiation is especially hard. Attention spans are short.
That means content has got to be smart. So do the campaigns around it. Just putting “words on a page” won’t cut the mustard if you’re looking to change minds or shape futures. Your material needs to be cleverer than that.
What makes smart content?
We like to think we’ve developed an extremely effective approach to campaigning. One which doesn’t depend on huge investments in market research or paid media, though that can help.
In fact, our smartest campaigns have been based on curiosity, ambition, and a dogged attachment to a handful of key principles for great material:
- A clearly defined target audience. The most effective campaigners are organisations that put the hard miles into pinpointing the groups they want to reach, and the mind shift they need to engineer
- Genuinely thought-provoking perspective. There’s too much content in the world for “me too” thinking (see Guy’s post on taller bell curves). While everyone else goes “zig,” we look for opportunities to “zag”
- Campaign friendliness: a theme which just works across multiple channels and over extended periods of time. Crucially, you need ways of restating your core message without seeming contrived. The best content writes its own marketing plan. Think: create once, reuse often
- Playfulness, through rhyme, alliteration, contrast, and so on. Wordplay makes your messages sticky. It helps them work in the pub. Getting it right can take time, but the best lines work their way into the fabric of the business surprisingly easily
None of this depends on extensive “soak sessions” or time-consuming audience research. Candid answers to some simple questions are all we need to pinpoint our brief. And from that point, the campaigns can flow. Check out our work to get a feel for our capabilities.
Of course, there’s more to our approach. And that’s where decades of experience come in. But the basic principles really are that simple.
If your content is feeling throwaway, and your campaigns lack clarity, why not drop us a line? We’d love to chat.