Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everyone has them, but it’s how those ideas are executed that is most important – especially when it comes to marketing. All too often, we come across businesses using the shotgun effect, in other words, a business will shoot out whatever idea they think of without any kind of strategy behind it. Generally, this stems from the thinking that they should get anything and everything out there to see what sticks. What does stick, they’ll continue with, and what doesn’t – well – they didn’t really think it would work anyway, so no harm done. This isn’t the way to do smart business.

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This past year has been full of marketing blunders and errors, leaving some high profile companies reeling in the aftermath. Without even a Google search, there are multiple examples of companies who suffered from some bad press this past year. The most prolific: Ashley Madison, Volkswagon and, of course, Subway.

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The number one complaint coming from Tinder users isn’t that they run out of matches or that it’s too hard to use. The number one complaint heard is that when they match and meet up with another user, they are not representative of what their profile showcased. Either they used an old photo, or hid the fact that they gained a little weight or lost a few teeth since their profile photo was taken. And this is a genuine complaint – it’s disappointing when people come to expect one thing and are presented with an entirely different reality.

It’s not authentic, not genuine and it slightly annoying. It’s no less annoying or inauthentic when marketers do it.

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It’s not uncommon to hear one of your friends divulge that they totally wept over the latest World Vision PSA or that they got a little choked up seeing that animal rescue special with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. I mean, you’d have to be a straight-up robot to have watched those adverts with a poker face (no disrespect to robots). A little more surprising, maybe, is the admission that said friend burst into tears over a dog food commercial, passing it off as too many glasses of wine.

But oh, my friend, it’s not all that accidental.

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When you’re looking to capture the millennial market — those same kids who grew up in the mid-90s to mid-oughties — you would do well to remember that the demographic was raised on the internet.

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Canada has just come out of the longest election we have had in two centuries and our friends to the South are just warming up for a year of debates and polls before voting next November. If the onslaught of political ads and speeches that has inundated all forms of communication channels has proven anything, it’s that marketing is a fundamental piece of the puzzle to running a successful political campaign, and it might not have always been that way.

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