Patrick Collister, NDA’s monthly creative columnist, is the Curator of The Caples Awards, Editor of Directory and a friend to Ad-Lib.io.
Did you see the pole vaulter Armand Duplantis at the Games?
He’d already won Gold and didn’t need to jump a third time. But he did and broke his own world record by a centimetre.
He likes to put on a show.
That third jump was his ninth world record.
He’s been breaking them one centimetre at a time. His latest jump is of 6.25 metres.
It’s more than possible he could jump 6.3 or 6.35 but he’s holding himself back.
Now, while we’re talking about records, long jumper Bob Beamon went to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico and leapt 8.90 metres, or 29 ft 2 ¼ inches. 55 centimetres further than any man had jumped before.
“Well done,” snarled the Welsh long jumper Lynn Davies, “You have destroyed this event.”
It is still an Olympic record, 56 years on.
When he was on the podium, Beamon asked himself, “Where do I go from here?”
The sightly sad answer was, all over the place.
Trainer, coach, graphic artist, social worker.
In a roundabout way, this brings me to Rory Sutherland.
(I would so, so love to watch Rory hurtle down a runway and launch himself into a sandpit. Wouldn’t you?)
Okay, so Rory is no athlete (I doubt he has ever worn a pair of Nikes) but he does have an entertainingly agile mind.
Recently, he’s been having a go at ROI, “the false God of quantification”. (HERE)
His beef is that their obsession with measurement inhibits companies from investing “in anything which has the slightest degree of speculative value.”
I tend to be a bit more emotional than that.
When I hear marketers talking about ROI, I want to shake them violently and scream loudly to jolt them out of their collective madness.
There was a time when ROI meant the reconciliation of costs vs results AFTER the campaign.
Now it’s a software package that predicts the outcome BEFORE you’ve lobbed a single ad out in the general direction of your target audience.
How is that possible?
The algorithm does equations with your frequency-and-reach numbers last year and the year before that. It factors in what your competitors have been up to. Then it spits out its conclusions.
Yay, repeat what you’ve been doing but for a small tweak here and there and a 6% or 7% ROI is achievable.
How unambitious is that?
As Einstein said, “Repetition is a form of madness.”
Of course, I know why ROI is so beguiling to a certain sort of client.
It negates the need for a creative leap. A big idea. You aren’t going to be asked to exercise judgement or make a decision.
