Your Life of Crime, Tips, Home Cooking, and Creative Destruction
Like many of you, I steal shamelessly.
The most recent example: An elderly friend at the gym asked another member if the creaking of a piece of equipment he was using was, in fact, his spine adjusting. It was a cheap, corny, Dad joke, but my goodness, it burned like fire. So yes, I used it later that week with a different group, and it delivered the sought-after eye rolls and barely concealed chuckles. The point, Bower, you ask?
Tis this: The best marketers and businesspeople I know pay close attention to what other smart people, peers, and competitors are doing. Then they appropriate (read: pilfer) and apply what they have learned to a completely different problem. Like Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
Ok, now that I’ve convinced some of you to pursue a life of crime, let me arm you with tips, trends, and observations curated by our vigilantly observant archers.
Tips, trends, and observations.
- Steal from outside your industry. Your competitors are generally not the knuckle-dragging lugs you think they are. They’re looking at the same competitors you are. And that’s why entire industries end up with nearly identical websites, stock photography, and everyone promising to be “innovative.” I’d suggest you look somewhere else. Healthcare can learn from hospitality. Financial services can learn from retail. B2B can learn a lot from consumer brands. Sometimes the best idea in your category hasn’t entered your category. Yet.
- Search isn’t dead. It’s having children. For roughly two decades, search marketing, making yourself visible and available to those looking for you, meant optimizing for Google. Now customers are asking questions of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI platforms with similarly ridiculous names. And here’s what’s dramatically different: They are often getting an answer without visiting your or your competitors’ websites. That, my friends, changes the assignment. Your content doesn’t just need to rank. It needs to be credible, structured, and authoritative enough to become part of the answer.
- AI is a very fast employee. AI can research, summarize, generate variations, analyze data, and get you from that terrifying blank page to something workable right quick. That is enormously valuable (and maybe, lazy…). But asking AI to “develop our marketing strategy” is a little like hiring an intern and immediately making her CMO. So yes, use the begeezus out of this new tool, but remember who’s supposed to be supervising whom. And yes, my English teacher mom would be proud of my proper pronoun usage.
- Brand and performance marketing need to start dating again. For years we’ve treated brand and performance as separate disciplines. The branding folks dress better, eat food they can’t pronounce, and have perfect elocution, whatever that is. The performance gang is an unruly admixture of savages and nerds who believe they keep the lights on. Brand creates demand. Performance captures it. But customers don’t experience them separately. That beautiful brand campaign eventually leads a prospect onto a conversion page. Maybe then it’s time to start seeing each other again.
- Your best-performing creative doesn’t need to look like an ad. Highly polished, breakthrough advertising still has its place. And it’s not just self-congratulatory awards shows on the French Riviera. But some of the best-performing digital creative increasingly looks like the content surrounding it. Useful observations, customer stories, and quick demonstrations can deliver high volumes of marketing- and sales-qualified leads better than traditional copy- and design-driven placements. Bet you a croissant this will work.
- Eat more of your own cooking. Marketers, like foodies, have an odd habit of constantly wanting something new. Meanwhile, there’s often something already working well that we’ve gotten bored with long before the audience has. Before reinventing, ask: What’s working that we simply do more of? It may not be as much fun, but you’ll boost the top line more profitably. And have more time to enjoy Mom’s lasagna.
As always, if I can do anything for you – share some experience, make a connection, or buy you a customized ski mask – please let me know.
Thanks again for your patient indulgence.
Best,
