Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

• Column: Getting To The Insight

• Inspiration: Mischievous Cows

• FREE White Paper: The Customer Acquisition Codex

Column: Getting To The Insight

The promised land of account planning is single-sentence briefs.

Take one of David Sao Paulo’s briefs to their creative team working on Burger King:

Play with fire.

That’s all the team needed to launch one of the most iconic ads ever (which ended up winning a gold lion in Cannes), “Burn That Ad”.

Burger King’s main competitor had a media budget 4 times bigger than BK. Their ads were pretty much everywhere. So David SP decided to use their media in BK’s favor by burning them. Using augmented reality, the Burger King app recognized their ads and burned them, transforming their ads into a delicious free Whopper coupon (which just so happen to be flame-grilled!).

This is the stuff of genius, but what makes it so is not only the exceptional execution, but also the simplicity of the insight.

What Holds Ideas Up

Ideas are all around us. Waiting to be caught, remixed, and recreated at any moment.

The problem is that great ideas are a little bit further away, whereas bad ones float at lot closer to us. So, the only way to reach that outer layer of ideas is by piercing through this atmosphere of shit in a focused and intentional way.

And a great insight is the rocket that gets you there.

Insights are a lot harder to manufacture, because they aren’t floating all around us. They’re hiding beneath the surface.

And to strike gold you need three critical pieces of information:

1. What’s a situationally relevant universal human truth about our audience?

2. What’s a current category truth that no one can escape?

3. What is the single most important and relevant truth about our brand?

This trifecta is like a pickaxe with GPS embedded on it.

Right at the intersection of the three you find an insight so piercingly obvious that makes you go “HOW did I not think of that!!”.

Take Goodby and Silversteins’ "Got Milk” key insight: the absence of milk is its biggest selling point.

What?! How so, you might ask?

Have ever eaten a cookie with a dry mouth?

If you have, then you’d know that the only way to wash it down is with a glass of milk.

Boom. A decades long communications platform was born.

Getting To The Universal Human Truth

Human truths are hiding deep inside us.

They are quiet, but are constantly humming in our ears, influencing our behaviours and thoughts.

These truths typically come from one of our core set of emotions:

The closer to the centre the more generic the emotion is. So you have to keep moving outwards to land on something that is so piercingly precise that your creatives will know exactly the sandbox you’re asking them to be creative in.

For example, take one of Snickers’ most iconic campaigns’ human truth: you are not you when you are hungry.

We all know the feeling they’re referring to here. It might not come quick, but with a little help from Snickers’ ad it hits me like a freight train: irritable.

This ‘aha’ moment is what make ads such as this so memorable. The bigger it is, the more memorable it is.

This human truth magic must then be folded into a category entry point that’s typically associated with your product, subtly tied to your brand truth, and then cleverly communicated in an unsuspecting manner.

This puzzle is incredibly difficult to crack, but it’s immensely satisfying when you do.

Creating A Web Of Knowledge

These moments of connection in which you strike genius by remixing two completely opposite ideas from unrelated domains of knowledge by distilling them down to their most relatable core… that folks, is how insights are made.

Which is why it’s so important that planners/strategists read and consume widely.

It can be tempting to stick to regurgitated business books and things you already know. But all that’s doing is reinforcing your already learned inclinations.

Pick up some classic Russian literature. Read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev. Try to relate to the lives of their characters (they make it incredibly easy to do so). Go deep, seek for the truths, not aspirations.

Watch genres of series and movies you’re not used to. Watch a Bong Joon-ho film. Stream a Baran bo Odar series.

Travel if you can. Across the world or simply across the tracks.

This type of exposure, when done thoughtfully, can become a major source of inspiration and sensibility.

The wider you learn, the more places new knowledge will have where to attach itself to. This approach to consumption isn’t meant to yield any sort of commercial success.

But it just so happens that as planners our profession pays us to do so.

Inspiration: Mischievous Cows

This is an oldie but a goodie.

Looking back at great ads and unpacking what made them so successful can be a major source of learning.

In this particular 2001 ad, Cravendale used a “Hitchcock-ean” approach to evoke emotions through creative.

It leans into comedy but via the meandering path of suspense and thrill.

I love this ad because they leaned into a product truth that quite literally any competitor could have leaned into — their great tasting milk.

It turns out that how good Cravendale’s milk actually tastes is completely subjective, but when “claimed” by the manufacturer in such an iconic way, it can become synonymous with the brand.

“So good the cows want it back” was such a breakthrough platform that other brands, such as Chick-fil-A, leaned into a similar territory decades later, where mischievous cows were delivering a hilarious messages to the public to “eat mor chikin”. Brilliant stuff.

FREE White Paper: The Customer Acquisition Codex

A few weeks ago I've had the pleasure to be on a customer acquisition panel with some of the great marketing minds in Calgary (Alex Paisley, David MacLean, and Michael Gaudet) with the Calgary Marketing Association, led by the great Marc Binkley.

The WJ Agency team and I prepared a Customer Acquisition "Codex" on some of the key concepts we believe to be imperative in understanding this hotly debated topic.

💡 The 95-5 Rule

💡 The Strategic Planning Process

💡 The Difference Between B2C and B2B

💡 Brand Building vs Performance Marketing

💡 And much more

If you're interested in getting a copy, drop a comment in this post and I’ll LinkedIn DM you a copy! (Depending on your LinkedIn settings, you might need to ‘follow’ me first so I can DM you).

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • Pick Your Distribution Channels Wisely

  • How To Properly Assess Distinctive Brand Assets

  • Strategists And Creatives Are Advertising’s Most Formidable Pairing

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.