Growth hacks in marketing & advertising. Part 3.

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director, etc. / LMMiami.com

  • There’s a cottage industry around the concept of “growth hacks”.
  • It is built around one premise: there always is a shortcut, an alternative way, a silver bullet.
  • Growth hacks, however, must be firmly rooted in big data.
  • It ain’t just throwing spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks.
  • Can the growth hack ethos, a quintessential Silicon Valley trait, migrate over to Madison Avenue?
  • Should it?
  • I tend to believe the answer is yes.
  • Despite the myriad cultural barriers and staunch resistance it would confront in the fossilized atmosphere of advertising, we admen & adwomen gotta give it a serious shot.
  • Cuz, let’s face it: the Madison Avenue business model has become the very definition of a legacy industry.
  • An industry by legacy brands for legacy brands.*
  • The hurdle?
  • Growth hacks, as mentioned above, are supposed to be based on the meticulous crunch of reams and reams of data.
  • A dispassionate, bias-free, decision-making process.
  • Not quite our cup of tea in the Mad Ave neck of the woods.
  • Madison Avenue can be an insular realm where, more often than not, whim, folly, personal agendas, ego and prejudice are the order of the day.
  • Still, a legacy industry such as Madison Avenue-style advertising has no other choice than reinventing itself as growth hacking consultants.
  • Innovation evangelists.
  • It is not that hard, it just requires a certain mindset.
  • An appetite for creative destruction.
  • A “what if” attitude.
  • And lots of aikido to go with the flow, overcome prejudice, habit, neurosis.
  • Growth hacking, it must be said, sometimes involves turning bugs into features.
  • “Turning a bug into a feature” is programmer parlance descriptive of an instance in which a flaw or glitch in a kernel of code is conveniently masqueraded and sold as a deliberate functionality.
  • A bit like cheating at solitary.
  • The pretense that what appeared to be a mistake was always there to serve a well thought out purpose.
  • The history of human progress is based on turning bugs into features.
  • Happenstance, unwanted results, unexpected consequences.
  • Here’s an idea: in the first installment of this article the week before last I described my spat with FedEx’s “brand Nazis” over an advertising idea I brought to their attention.
  • To be fair, the idea was approved, only in a half assed way.
  • There was, however, another idea that they rejected that could’ve been a massive new revenue stream for the company: using their trucks as OOH advertising vehicles.
  • Imagine the amount of ad dollars they could attract.
  • At any given time, FedEx has possibly tens of thousands of vehicles roaming the streets of America that would be coveted advertising displays for lots of brands willing to pay top dollar.
  • Of course, no need to turn FedEx or USPS trucks into NASCAR cars.
  • No need to add more eyesores to our already polluted streets.
  • It could be done tastefully.
  • Imagine the much needed jolt of cash a revenue stream of this caliber would signify for the perennially on the brink of bankruptcy US Postal Service.

*Facebook and Google are predicted to make $106 billion from advertising in 2017, almost half of the world’s entire digital ad spend: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/21/facebook-and-google-ad-youtube-make-advertising-in-2017.html
 

 

Skip to content