Why does one of the world’s most innovative industry sectors produce so much marketing that looks and sounds the same?
Updated: Oct 6
An ongoing personal investigation into advertising, technology
marketing and the core question that won’t go away.
I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to answer that question. For most of that timeI thought I knew the answer. I’m increasingly less sure. This is the first in a series of chapters that explore the why’s and wherefores of technology marketing communications as I see it.
Stupidly, they hired me.
Ten years ago, I took a head decision to join a marketing agency in the tech sector as Creative Director. My logic was that technology was the one sector that would never date. After all, technology was the physical manifestation of progress, so as long as the human race kept striving for better, there would be technology to market, and I would be
gainfully employed. It seemed like a safe bet. A safer bet than continuing to ply my trade in advertising agencies that had decided, in a desire to be taken as seriously as management consultancies, to sell hours not outcomes. That was never going to end well.
Like all humans I’m susceptible to taking short cuts. This technology marketing agency had recently been voted B2B Marketing Agency of the Year. Twice previously in my twenty-year career, I’d worked at consumer advertising agencies that had won similar Agency of the Year accolades. But I couldn’t see much on this agency’s website that
appealed to my creative sensibilities. I told myself that agency websites are rarely up to date, are they? And Agency of the Year must count for something, no?
I was honest through the interview process that most of my experience was in consumer marketing. But I did have some business-to-business advertising experience and had worked on accounts with long sales cycles and complex buying committees. More importantly, I could see how I could help them. Stupidly they hired me.
Surely all marketing is supposed to generate demand?
On my first day I met with the existing lead creative and asked him if I could see the illustrious creative work that was in the winning Agency of the Year submission. It seemed that the agency website was up to date. I’d been expecting a showreel of imaginative campaigns and ideas. Compelling, emotive stories of how the world’s most innovative companies plied their trade. What I was presented with was digital ads, emails and landing pages, eBooks, listicles and white papers.
Campaigns were product-messaging-driven, accompanied by stock photography adorned with graphic devices. The work was professional, design-led, polished, well-crafted, but conceptually literal. From a consumer advertising perspective, it felt underwhelming and far from competitive. I was then told that these were specifically ‘Demand Generation’ campaigns. It was a new term to me. “Surely all marketing is supposed to generate demand?” I countered.
Seeing this technology marketing creative work made me think. This was a successful agency. These were by all accounts successful campaigns that had delivered against their objectives. But I’d spent my advertising career thinking creativity should be used to make brands noticed, liked, remembered and chosen. Here, creativity was largely being used to organise and communicate information that helped move an identifiable prospect towards Sales. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I would eventually come to think of much of what I was seeing as a particular kind of creativity – Systematic Creativity. Efficient systems of digital design and language that presupposed audience interest, then navigated them through pre-determined content journeys.
It was clear I had lots to learn, so out came the questions. “Were these tech brands already well known to the audiences?” — Not necessarily. “How long will these campaigns run?” — A quarter. Maybe two. “What happens then?” — We’ll get another brief. “Are we building on this idea next time?” — Probably not. “Why not?” — New quarter. New proposition. “But what about the brand?” — Oh, that’s handled internally by the brand team. “Is it messaging married with design language too?”— Yes of course. We all adhere to the same brand guidelines.
Where was the theatre?
I was introduced later to our American sister agency. The Creative Director talked through their latest campaigns. Colours that popped. Geometric shapes with apparent inherent meanings. Treatments to photography. Short, literal, punchy headlines, that bore an uncanny similarity to what we might have called propositions in the ad agencies. It seemed that in the world of technology marketing Design with a big ‘D’ was king. It was all super-slick but where was the theatre?
No film. No music. No characters. No comedy. No storytelling. No drama (unless you count colours popping). No surprise. No emotion. No entertainment. There was the orange-hued campaign. The one with minty green hi-tech padlocks against black. Plus, the one with ‘No compromise’ in 3D type set into the stock photography, a pastiche of the opening titles of the film Panic Room. The following day I couldn’t remember most of it. Did that matter? Perhaps not.
Maybe I’d entered a marketing world where rational buyers really did only want rational information. Maybe enterprise technology really was different. Maybe the methodologies I’d learned selling beer, supermarkets, cars, confectionary or whatever else were inappropriate here. Perhaps I simply didn’t understand the technology market. Like I said previously, a stupid hire.
However much I weighed it all up, I couldn’t get past a huge contradiction. The technology products themselves were extraordinary: cloud computing, cybersecurity, robotics. Software that transformed businesses and the way people worked. Companies staffed by brilliant engineers creating genuinely innovative technology. Yet when they communicated, many seemed to reach for the same vocabulary and visual grammar. Faster, smarter, simpler, secure, transform, innovate and, ironically, reimagine were married with clichéd tech imagery – nodes, networks, shields, padlocks and clouds. Why does one of the world’s most innovative industries produce so much marketing that looks and sounds the same?
It’s a question that’s been an albatross around my neck for the past decade. Had I only ever worked in technology marketing I probably wouldn’t feel the contradiction so strongly. But my creative standards and values were set in world-class advertising agencies at a time when advertising was better than the television programmes around it. How times change, but that’s another story.
I had grown up professionally working on campaigns that ran for decades not quarters. ‘Every little helps’ for Tesco. ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers can’t reach.’ ‘Reassuringly expensive’ for Stella Artois. ‘The world’s local bank’ for HSBC. ‘Be the Best’ for British Army recruitment.
Serious doesn't have to mean forgettable
My four years as joint Creative Director on the British Army account are particularly relevant because of the notion of risk. I’m continually told that risk is what makes tech buyers and hence tech marketing more sober and hence different. I’ve never read of anyone being killed for buying the wrong SaaS solution. I do, however, vividly remember soldiers who helped us create recruitment films later losing their lives in the line of duty. Risk, it seems, is all relative. Which is why you’ll never hear me use the word ‘brave’ as a descriptor for clients buying more creative marketing.
What the four years of Army recruitment campaigns did teach me (which is of greatest relevance to technology marketing) was about complex communication journeys and long buying cycles that involve not just targeting the potential recruits, but their family, friends, teachers and wider peer group too.
We still managed to create marketing that captured the challenges of being a soldier in an imaginative way — a live expedition up the West Ridge of Mount Everest being one of the best examples, where the enemy was Mother Nature, not another country or regime. So, risk is not a reason to not stand out. Tech brands are not trying to camouflage themselves to avoid detection within the category. Quite the opposite. The greater risk is brand anonymity, which creates zero familiarity and zero consideration.
Creating familiarity was at the heart of everything I was ever taught in advertising. The relationship analogy was the one that was most overused. First, introduce yourself. Assume indifference and perhaps even borderline contempt. So, be engaging, charming, immediate, self deprecating, helpful and even funny. Take it slow, be consistent, but equally imaginative n how you’re consistent. This led to the search for big or long ideas that could fuel brand growth for years. Efficiency marauding as effectiveness
Digital changed all that. Not the format. But the promise. Platforms told brands that they didn’t have to pay for expensive, imaginative creativity. Instead, Digital would discover buyer intent, then serve the right message to the right prospect at the right time. Turbo-charged sales enablement. The stranger who makes the sale, because they understand the need. It’s a seductive concept. But it felt to me over the next decade as though something was being drained from advertising: charm, personality, entertainment. It was efficiency marauding as effectiveness.
In the face of such digital promises, creativity had to start explaining its place in marketing. Today it feels like I spend 10% of the time thinking of ideas and 90% justifying why they should work, then getting them through an assault course of stakeholders who want to know the science behind the art. How do you know this will work? is the most frequent question. I’m honest in response. Marketing, like all competition, is a game of probability. You can try and influence the probability that you succeed, but equally you have to be comfortable playing with only half the information that you might need. Make a strategy. Commit to it long-term. Get work in market. Learn and adapt. Hold your nerve.
Literal + Lateral = Memorable
To try and explain why some creative approaches are better than others, I looked at the advertising work I had produced that was most successful in shifting awareness and driving an initial sales uplift, whilst acknowledging that Promotion is the weakest lever of the four ‘P’s. In a world that was increasingly code-based, I then tried to codify my creative thinking process.
This led to a simple equation: Literal + Lateral = Memorable. There was always the literal message that the brand wanted to convey, often the proposition in the creative brief. But we knew that it was either the lateral context, delivery or situation that would make it memorable. If you want to sell Stella Artois beer, tell stories of how it was a beer of great worth and value, but set the stories hundreds of years ago in a fictional version of France. A literal message in a lateral, unexpected context. This is a dramatic oversimplification of a campaign that was hugely effective for a quarter of a century.
Great writing, casting, music, humour, and cinematography were all equally important, but the foundations lay in that equation. Equally, if you’re in a low-interest category like insurance comparison and want people to remember your company, create a Russian-accented meerkat entrepreneur to tell your story. The message is literal, the delivery mechanism lateral. The combination is memorable. If it’s all too lateral with no anchor in literalism, that will fail to create a memory too.
‘Literal + Lateral = Memorable’ was the founding cornerstone philosophy of our agency, LogicLogicMagic. A formula to help the more literal marketers understand why more lateral elements are needed. I remember presenting our agency creds to a West Coast American CMO at a Cloud Technology company after their European colleagues had recommended us. “What does lateral mean?” was his first response. This lack of understanding was evident across all that company’s branding and marketing. But this was a successful company. Backed by venture capital funding, they had a peak valuation of $4.2 billion. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the tech marketing sector is different. Maybe they don’t need imaginative marketing.
The venture capital funding is an interesting element. No consumer brand I had worked on for twenty years started with VC backing. Brands had to bootstrap their way to challenge in the market. That led to extremely creative campaigns which had to cut through with minimal media spend. You couldn’t have a consumer brand with a high valuation that didn’t understand 4P marketing and the growth it drives. I started privately thinking of some of these tech companies as the trust-fund kids of marketing. Deep pockets and shallow marketing expertise. Superficial in their understanding of what it takes to build a brand, because they’ve always had money. It’s a satisfying explanation. Which doesn’t necessarily make it true.
What if I’m wrong?
Perhaps the tech sector is different. It’s logical that complex, risky, considered purchases need clarity more than entertainment. Micro-targeting, if it genuinely works as promised, would potentially reduce the need for broad memorable creativity. Maybe the quarterly demand generation machine exists because it works. It could be that the type of creativity I grew up with in consumer advertising genuinely matters less in the technology sector. Different sports, played with different rules that only appear superficially similar to a naïve onlooker.
But the element of competition is the same, no? The competition to make the consideration list. The competition to have your content read. So, what is the relationship between competition and creativity? What can one learn from the other?
For nearly a decade of my life before advertising I was a competitive rower, winning medals for Scotland and Great Britain at junior level and England at senior level. Competitive rowing was a balance of physiology and psychology. We learned how to beat crews who were on paper better than us. It was a mindset I took into advertising. Competing energetically on behalf of brands against their competitors. Using creativity rather than physiology to push towards being market leaders.
I’m fascinated by the relationship between competition and creativity. This written journey is my attempt to understand it, and what each might teach us about the other. Becoming competitive starts with questioning your beliefs. So that’s where I’m starting.
Does being different really make something more memorable? Did digital targeting reduce the need for creativity? Do high-risk purchases require more rational marketing? Why do organisations find systematic creativity easier to approve than imaginative creativity? Does consistency help brands become memorable? Or help categories become homogeneous? What is creativity actually competing against? And if AI makes competent creativity virtually limitless, what becomes valuable next?
I have some hypotheses as to why technology marketing communications play by the rules they do, resulting in the homogenous output. I’d like to find out whether I’m right. Maybe it’s a trust or understanding issue? So let’s start the investigation with creativity itself, and ask the question when did marketing stop trusting it? If you’ve worked in technology marketing for any length of time, I’m interested in whether you recognise any of this — particularly if you don’t. Where do you think I’ve got it wrong? I’m going to post regularly as I unpack numerous hypotheses that surface from these personal experiences and subsequent explorations.
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