What modern marketers can learn from JWT’s long lost 1974 strategic planning bible
Some see everything new and shiny as optimal, and everything that came before as the domain of luddites and, god forbid, old people! This has a knock on impact, particularly in agency land, where the average age is probably somewhere around the early 30s and many senior marketers get out before they hit 40.
Mark Ritson refers to this as the ‘tactification’ of marketing. He has argued at length that a sort of creeping anti-intellectualism (I’m looking at you, Mr Vaynerchuck) means “marketing seems to be devolving into a base tactical pursuit devoid of strategic thinking.”
This thought struck me after I recently saw a post from a renowned young marketer talking about how “marketing has fundamentally changed forever.” We do ourselves a disservice with comments like this. People have always had a ‘novelty bias’ and will be drawn towards newness, and sure, the tactics we use to communicate with people are incredibly different even from 24 months ago.
But there are also many, many things about marketing that haven’t changed in decades.
A few years ago I saw Irish advertising legend John Fanning speak. One of the things he said stuck with me. Modern adland looks forward too much and forgets to look backward. We ignore our history. While technology is changing what we do, that doesn’t make what’s gone before irrelevant. Brands have faced similar challenges for decades, but we ignore the learnings.
As the famous Churchill quote goes: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
This is a topic that some of the smartest thinkers of our age have reminded us of.
Bill Bernbach spoke about the need for a communicator to be concerned with the ‘unchanging man‘.
Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, two of the richest men in the world, consistently refer to the power of learnings the patterns of history because “when you find something that doesn’t change, you can step off the treadmill of keeping up and start to compound your knowledge.” This should sound familiar to modern marketers.
Jeff Bezos suggests that you should build a business strategy around the things you know are stable in time: “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”
It seems clear to me that we’re missing a chance to learn from marketing’s history.
But where should we be looking?
Read the full article on Mumbrella.
