Inspiration The marketing and creative power of the words “why not?”

If you want some marketing inspiration sometime soon, PLEASE find some time to watch Wistia’s “One. Ten. One hundred.” series.

It is some of the most creative, brilliant marketing I have ever seen. But I want to pull one line from Claude Zeins out of the second episode because I think it’s really, really important.

“I’m so in my element when it’s just run and gun shooting. I find that so liberating because if you need to shoot something again you don’t need to wait for the AD to call everyone to do their thing. When it’s just $1,000 and you and a couple other people making something, it’s pretty fun.”

I’ve talked a lot about how, in some ways, I feel like I’m still trying to find myself. Well, that line was one of those. I rewound it and listened to it again…and again…and, yeah, probably too many times.

But I did because that’s me. And by “that” I mean “run and gun” and by “shooting” I mean “marketing”. As I reflect on my journey as a marketer, it was those moments of “run and gun marketing” that I was in my element. It was then that I was doing my best marketing.

The Concern
Sometimes as marketers, we get stuck debating the finer points of a campaign in an effort to discover whether we should or shouldn’t spend the time on it.

I think yesterday’s passholder birthday shoutout from Sunday River could fall into that category.

“What if we miss someone? Will they get mad? What if someone doesn’t want others to know it’s their birthday? Or maybe we should do it monthly instead of weekly? Or email isn’t the right venue? What if they’ve unsubscribe and never see it? Or…”

You could easily debate this one thing alone, as a team, for 30 minutes. But remember what I said yesterday? Adding something like this probably only takes 10-15 minutes for one person.

The Cost of Deciding
Every team deals with this. A software company may spend a 100 hours to decide which of two 100-hour projects to build. An operations person may spend dozens of hours researching which snowmobile to buy even though the time he spent is worth much more than that.

And, yes, marketers may spend more time debating whether or not to try something than it would have taken to just try it in the first place.

By all means, have a plan and stay on course. And, yes, make sure you’re not missing some major issue in privacy or what not. But make sure you and the team have some autonomy to just try things. To run and gun and follow new ideas. Sometimes the answer to a new idea isn’t, “let’s talk about it”, but rather, “why not?”

And if there isn’t a good answer? Stop talking. And go for it.

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