Why Telemarketers are the Worst Brand Storytellers

Posted by Jon Thomas, 24 Jul 2013

There’s a certain feeling I get, and I’m sure we all get, when I answer the telephone and am greeted by a telemarketer. There are a few feelings, actually. Sort of like the five stages of grief.

First, I feel a bit foolish, as if I’d been tricked into picking up the phone. This is especially true when it’s a number I don’t recognize yet I answer anyway on the off chance that it’s an emergency. From there I get impatient. I have no idea how long this person wants to keep me on the phone and I immediately start thinking about all the other things I have to do instead of listen to their sales pitch. Surprisingly, I then feel empathetic, since I too am a marketer (albeit one with a very different approach to sales) and wouldn’t want someone hanging up on me while I’m just doing my job. It isn’t long before I become angry, having been interrupted by an unwelcomed marketer of a product I surely don’t need. If they won’t let me get a word in edgewise, after trying to politely say “Thanks but no thanks” I will hang up.

That’s one end of the spectrum—the absolute worst way to be sold a product or service.

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What’s the ROI in That?

Posted by Jon Thomas, 02 Jan 2013

There seems to be no better time of year for brands to empty their pockets and slap their logos everywhere they can in hopes of gaining exposure than the end of the calendar year. Between the New Year’s Eve televised specials, holiday parades, college football bowl games, sponsored parties, Times Square billboards, Super Bowl commercials and more, the in-your-face advertising is literally unavoidable. 

This type of advertising is nothing new. It’s something we’ve lived with for decades and it expands further with each passing year. But the age we live in now, the post-advertising age, has provided audiences with a bit of perspective. The stadium sponsorships, Super Bowl commercials, Times Square billboards—it all seems a little…funny, doesn’t it?   

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The Best Advertising Isn’t Advertising Anymore

Posted by Jon Thomas, 05 Dec 2012

For decades, advertising was a joyous place. Executives enjoyed two-martini lunches as they watched the ad dollars roll in. Ads were spread through every new medium—from print to radio to television. Ad agencies were held to vague benchmarks, and they promised massive exposure (as measured by metrics like number of print subscribers, average daily travelers passing by a billboard or number of television purchases) to the highest bidder. Brands blindly believed that these metrics (potential eyeballs) meant guaranteed success. 

Advertising still is a joyous place, but for different reasons. Two-martini lunches are a thing of the past (or at least I’m not invited to them). But martinis aside, advertising in the post-advertising age is filled with amazing creativity and opportunities to constantly challenge the status quo, innovate and reach audiences with unique and authentic content.

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Microsoft’s “Brandon Generator” is Close, but No Cigar

Posted by Jim Boulton, 11 Jul 2012

Post-advertising is based on brands genuinely adding value to consumers’ lives by generously giving them valuable content. By providing rewarding experiences, brands earn the right to expose consumers to their products and services. At its core, post-advertising is about creating an audience around relevant content and then migrating that audience to relevant products and services.

Microsoft’s crowd-sourced, animated graphic novel, Brandon Generator, a stylish, Sin City type animation in which the audience helps shape the protagonist’s world, would seem to meet this definition.

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What Brands Can Learn from Louis C.K.’s Marketing Success

Posted by Mike Cannon, 03 Jul 2012

Comedians are inherently self-promoters. In fact we often refer to ourselves as whores. I should know, because I am one. Selling yourself is a tricky business, and even with the emerging technologies that the post-advertising age has afforded comedians—Twitter, YouTube, podcasting, and more—nearly all still follow the standard protocols of producing and selling their content and themselves to get ahead…except Louis C.K.

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Post-Advertising Survival Guide, Vol 2: Audience Management

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 05 Jun 2012

As a brand, it's not enough just to draw in traffic; you need to help create, maintain and support a community. And to do that, you need to know how to answer a few simple questions:

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Post-Advertising Survival Guide, Vol. 1: Nudge Marketing

Posted by Jim Boulton, 14 May 2012

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about nudge marketing, a theory based on behavioral economics. It describes the power of “choice architecture,” the art of arranging seemingly equivalent options so that more people will make one particular choice. This proposition is especially potent for the social web, which Obama’s election team harnessed so well in the campaign to win the White House and which was imitated by the UK’s Tory party in the 2010 election.

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Post-Advertising Summit

Post-Advertising Summit Brings Storytelling to Life

Posted by Andrea Fjeld, 04 Apr 2012

Since 2008, we've been charting the evolving landscape of marketing and discussion the future of advertising at this blog. For the better part of the last decade, Story Worldwide (who keep the lights on here at Post-Advertising) has been helping brands unearth their story and tell it across a wide variety of channels, both on and offline.

Few editorial outlets put these ideas into action, in real life, alongside fellow industry colleagues. But last Thursday, March 29th, we finally brought Post-Advertising readers, Story leaders, storytellers, agencies and brands together to not just write, but actually prove, that the path towards and through the future of marketing is paved with storytelling. More about what unfolded after the jump.

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Balancing Privacy and Transparency in Social Media

Posted by Jon Thomas, 19 Dec 2011

This post originally appeared in our December issue of "Live Report from the Future of Marketing," our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The art of tightrope walking is one of those feats whose objective is simple but accomplishing it is not: The walker must travel from one end of the tightrope to the other without falling off. All of us at some point in our lives have tried a version of this, usually on the curb of a sidewalk, and have quickly realized that it’s not as easy as it looks. It takes balance and concentration to keep from falling. Make it a high wire and the difficulty increases exponentially: Failure now has much more dire consequences.

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The Post-Advertising Summit marketing conference in New York October 21

Story To Host World’s First Post-Advertising Summit!

Posted by Keith Blanchard, 29 Sep 2011

After three years of charting the emerging Post-Advertising world right here with you guys, we decided to throw our very own real world event: The Post-Advertising Summit! (March 29th, at New York’s Cult Studios. Details here). In other words, we're throwing a party...and you're all invited!

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